Autumn-calving herds will be starting the breeding of cows in just a few weeks, so it is important that you select the correct sires for your herd.
For farms that are milking cows during the winter or have liquid contracts to fulfil, breeding will begin in late-December.
For the majority of winter milk herds (<50% liquid contract), starting to calve in October will suffice to meet contract targets.
You also need to determine how many cows are actually needed to fulfil your contract, having extra cows calving at that time of year is difficult to make pay.
You should try and maximise uses of sexed semen to produce the target number of heifer calves, and then use high-dairy beef index (DBI) sires on cows that select to breed replacements.
Autumn-calving
For dairy sire selection the advice from Teagasc is to select a panel of high economic breeding index (EBI) bulls (>€300) from the active bull list.
Your bull team should be balanced for both the milk (>€100) and fertility (>€120) sub-index.
Target a high combined kilo of milk solids (>35kg) figure in the team of bulls.
Aim to hold the milk volume proof at 0-150kg with high-fat (>0.24) and protein (>0.17) potential.
The health sub-index has shown a direct correlation to somatic cell count (SCC) performance; therefore, select bulls that are positive for health, with a team average >€5.
Avoid extremes with regard to type/conformation in order to breed a medium-sized, functional cow that will last in the herd.
Remember a cow with a maintenance sub-index of €8 shall be 600kg mature liveweight.
For a herd of 100 cows, seven bulls should be selected, with two-to-three bulls within your bull team with low calving ease proofs for use on your replacement heifers.
Target to breed all replacement heifers in the first ten days of the breeding season, a simple synchronisation programme will help achieve this.
Beef sires
Almost as important as selecting your dairy sires for your autumn-calving cows, is going to be selecting beef sires for use on the poorer performing cows.
Using your herd records, you should identify the lower performing cows in the herd, they should be either marked for culling or breed to beef bulls.
Tools that are available such as the dairy beef index (DBI) should be used to select these sires that are going to give you the highest-quality calves.
Similar to the EBI, it is important to look at the indexes within DBI when selecting your bulls.
Picking bulls solely off the DBI euro value is not how to select the correct bulls for use on your herd.
You want first break your cows down into different groups such as heifers, second calvers, cows and matures cows.
Then select a calving difficulty and gestation length you are comfortable with, for each of these groups. y
From the bulls that suit the criteria you should then select bulls with the highest beef sub-index to give the calf the highest commercial beef value (CBV).
Ask for advice from your breeding advisors if need to get a better understanding of how to select the correct beef sires.