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Martin O'Hare is farming full-time on his intensive suckler-to-beef farm in Knockbridge, Co Louth. The 60ha farm has 25ha of tillage and 35ha of grassland. The farm is currently at a high stocking rate of 3.94LU/ha. Land type is good quality with free-draining soil laid out in three segregated blocks.
There are excellent roadways and further paddocks have been created since the start of the programme. These roadways make for ease of handling stock, especially during the breeding season.
Bulls finished
Martin slaughters all bulls when they are under 16 months and heifers at 22 months. Last week, he sent off his first batch of spring 2017-born bulls. They killed out at an average cold weight of 400kg, average carcase grade U- and average fat score 2+. A 400kg average carcase was the marker set out for Martin at the beginning of the programme.
Martin told me how he got these bulls to under 16-month beef. “The bulls were housed off grass in November and put on to high-quality silage along with 3kg of meal. In early January, they were upped to 6kg of high maize ration and still being fed silage with a small bit of straw and in March they got 10kg of high maize meal along with straw up until slaughter.”
Breeding
Breeding started on 16 April. A selection of cows and all the heifers are currently being artificially inseminated; so far, 43 out of 46 have been served to AI. The Charolais stock bull is running with the remaining 40 cows and the majority of these cows have been served. Breeding will finish on 9 July and all breeding stock will be scanned at the end of July. Empty cows or heifers will be culled.
AI sires being used on the farm at present include Tubridmore Gizmo ET (RGZ), Castleview Gazelle (ZAG) and Rio (RIO), all of which are bulls with good replacement traits.
Autumn-born bulls
Martin calves down 25 cows between the middle of August and early October each year. Bulls that were born in autumn 2017 are currently in the process of being weaned. The cows are being grazed on light covers to aid the drying-off process, while the bulls are creep grazing on good grass covers and are being feed 1kg of meal per day.
One or two cows are taken away from the group every couple of days. Martin believes this process of weaning is less stressful on the bulls. Once weaned, the bulls will be grazed on good-quality grass for the rest of the summer and will then be housed in September.
Martin is expecting these bulls to reach an average weight of 500kg at the time of housing. The feeding regime at housing will be 3kg of meal along with quality surplus silage that was taken from paddocks for the first couple of weeks before gradually rising up to 6kg of meal with a mix of silage and straw, and finally building up to 10kg along with straw. The plan is to have them finished and ready for slaughter before Christmas.
Grass growth
One of Martin’s objectives at the beginning of the BETTER farm programme was to convert more of his tillage ground to grassland and increase his stocking rate. On 12 May, 20ac was sown with a high-yielding grass seed mixture. This ground will be used to take silage from in the coming years as Martin intends to increase his stocking rate and extra silage reserves will be needed.
Grass growth on the farm remains good with 83kg DM/ha grown in the last week, However, the dry weather spell may pose a problem to the farm as ground is starting to burn up a little and grass growth well be hampered if rain doesn’t come in the next few days.
BETTER farm: developments in the Banner county
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