It’s that time of the year again. Days are getting shorter and the heavy cattle on the ABP Demo Farm are heading for the shed to be finished.

Grass supplies had remained tight on the farm after the recent dry spell.

The spring 2024-born dairy-beef heifers were housed for finishing on August 7 with an average weight of 440kg.

Commenting on the housing weight of the heifers, the farm manager said: "This is on target. Our heaviest was a Limousin-sired heifer weighing 532kg."

In 2024, it took on average 74 days on the finishing diet to get all heifers slaughter fit.

All animals on the ABP Demo Farm are housed during the finishing period for ease of management and to ensure trial conditions are consistent.

Heifers are slowly built up to 5kg of concentrates, usually beginning at 2kg/head/day.

Concentrate levels in the diet are increased by 300g/day until 5kg/day is reached.

This is the same protocol as is used for the steers; However, they are built up to 8kg/head/day. The steers averaged 82 days on the finishing diet in 2024.

The spring-2024-born steers were housed two weeks ago (last week of August) with an average weight of 490kg.

Sean said: "There are some great bullocks this year with over 60 of them weighing north of 520kg."

The heaviest bullock in the batch is a 626kg bullock sired by AA8766 that was grazing the multi-species sward in the trial in conjunction with University College Dublin (UCD).

The trial group of cattle grazing the multi-species platform performed excellently over the year, according to Sean, with these averaging 564kg at housing and their grass-only contemporaries averaging 547kg at housing.

Both groups averaged approximately 1kg average daily live weight gain (ADG) per head post turnout.

All cattle on the ABP Demo Farm are finished indoors on a straw lie-back with slats at the front.

Sean said: "Thrive has been very good during the finishing period in previous years."

He explained that last year, the steers averaged 1.64kg ADG and heifers 1.49kg ADG.

"This was exceptional and exceeded expectations. We would be hoping for somewhere around 1.3-1.4kg/day," he said.

"Slaughter performance-wise, we’ll be hoping that the heifers will be averaging 270kg carcass weight and steers will average 320kg carcass weight.

"We will need all the cattle to be slaughtered to house our weanlings for the winter," he said.

To utilise the drop in grass demand when the older cattle are housed on the farm, approximately 660 store lambs have been bought in on the ABP Demo Farm at an average weight of 30kg.