The latest ABP Monitor Farm update comes from John Twohigs’ dairy and beef farm in Bandon, Co. Cork, where the dairy herd breeding is now drawing to a close.
John is one of eight farmers located across Ireland that form ABP’s Monitor Farms. These eight farms are just some of the many ABP suppliers involved in the processor’s sustainability initiative, the ‘Advantage Beef Programme’.
On the Twohig farm, all cows and heifers were Artificially Inseminated (AI’d) to Angus bulls and there have been very few repeats since breeding began back in early May.
With the recent dry spell, grass growth has slowed on the farm, like many other farms across the country and this has also taken a toll on grass quality.
Grass is getting stemmy and grazing management is becoming more tricky, but cows are still milking well despite this.
John has not had to introduce silage or additional concentrates into the parlour yet, but if growth continues to slow, this could change.
John recently sent his Angus stock bull to the factory and the bull which served the herd for almost six years killed out at 620kg carcass weight and graded U=.
He says that this bull “will be hard to replace seeing as his figures were so good”.
The bull was +18.9kg for carcass weight, but John is using high-quality Angus sires on the herd to continue breeding quality dairy-beef animals.
A few of Johns calves were treated for coccidiosis in recent days. He noticed scours in the calves and took a faecal egg sample, which came back positive for coccidiosis.
He dosed the calves accordingly and he’s already seeing an improvement in the animals that had an issue.
Other than that, calves are performing well. They are currently being offered 2kg/head/day of ration as well as access to fresh straw ad-lib, as an additional source of roughage.
The calves are being strip grazed on strong grass that hasn’t recently received Nitrogen (N) fertiliser.
Second cut silage will hopefully be secured on the farm within the next month. Silage ground received 2,500g/ac of slurry/ac and 80 units/ac of protected urea + sulphur.
More information on the Advantage Beef Programme and the ABP Monitor Farms can be found by clicking here.