Beef Plan Movement (BPM) has welcomed the recent launch of a new Commercial Beef Value (CBV) tool but added that there is room for improvement.
Compiled by the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) / Teagasc, the new service will help farmers to determine the commercial value of stock presenting at marts and elsewhere.
In essence, CBV will provide non-breeding beef farmers with a better insight into a specific animal’s genetic merit.
It comprises five traits from the Terminal Index that are important to a non-breeding drystock enterprise.
These are: Carcase weight; Carcase conformation; Carcase fat cover; Docility; and feed intake.
The CBV is expressed as a euro value, similar to that found within the current replacement and terminal Indexes – with both ‘within breed type’ and ‘across breed’ star ratings.
BPM dairy beef committee chairman, Sean Ó’Connell said:
“ICBF determines this value by viewing the overall picture of beef animals including parental beef carcase traits, weight and conformation potential, fat, feed and docility characteristics.
“At the moment, it’s very much like a lottery at ringside. Calves and stores are bought purely on visual inspection where most, by and large, are very similar other than colour.
“Only at a much later stage in the calf’s development will certain traits become evident and these can often disappoint particularly with dairy cross stock,” he added.
Improving Commercial Beef Value
According to the BPM chair, the end game for every beef finisher is to maximise performance on weight, conformation and fat score on finished animals.
“This tool goes a long way in pre-empting this result and has to be very welcome,” Ó’Connell continued.
However, BPM members believe that the new tool can be further improved.
“The CBV is only as good as the information available to it. The parental information from both dam and sire of each animal has to be registered,” he said.
“Regulation provides for only the dam’s identification to be registered. In this case a CBV cannot be determined. For it to work this would require the mandatory registration of all sires.
“We would question the docility aspect of the CBV. This is addressed in our breeding herd. Animal traits and conformation are key here.
Breeding
Beef Plan Movement said there is also no mention of actual breeds relative to the CBV figure, as in previous ICBF reports, where breed percentages were visible.
“This is now more pertinent at present when some processors are now DNA testing carcasses and are excluding some breeds from significant bonuses to the farmer based on percentages of those breeds,” Ó’Connell said.
He also pointed out that no mention is given to the inclusion of this information on the blue identity cards in the case of increasing farm to farm sales.
“CBV represents a huge move forward for buyers and sellers of calves and stores. We would encourage all marts to come on board with this initiative.”