Culling cows or removing of them from a herd is important to ensure that the herd continues to improve and poor-performing animals are removed.
A question for many dairy farmers at present is whether the current beef prices should impact on when they decide to sell their cull cows.
Put simply, the answer to this is no; the price achieved for the cow at a factory or mart should not influence when they leave the herd.
Dairy cows are there to produce milk and although the cull cow price can be useful, they should have earned their keep from milk sales by the time they are culled.
Culling cows
Cows are selected for culling for a number of reasons. Another question on dairy farmers’ minds is whether it makes any difference to continue milking cows that have been identified as cull cows for production reasons only.
A cow culled for production reasons is not preforming how you want them to. Some might actually not be profitable due to the low margins in milk this year.
Keeping these cows for another few weeks or months isn’t going to change their profit margin and the extra few cents/kg is also not going to change that.
If you have a cow that is a good producer but hasn’t gone in calf the argument could be made that they should be milked on.
But, this is still another mouth to feed during a year when fodder has been a challenge to harvest and grazing conditions for many others have been similar.
These cows are also adding to outgoing costs of the farm, when the cost of production is high and milk price is low.
Beef price
Is waiting for the price of beef to lift really something that dairy farmers should be worried about? Let’s take a pretend case study.
If you have a 550kg cow, that kills out with a carcass of 231kg (42%), if you were to wait for prices to increase and there is a 10c/kg lift that is only €23.10.
If you keep that cow for an extra six weeks, is there really any benefit to this?
And even if the cow is still producing milk, it may not change this; a poor performer or a cow that has cell count issues is likely going to lose even more money.
While in the case of good producer that hasn’t gone in calf, it might make you an extra few quid from the cow.
The beef trade has been in decline with cow prices falling, but this trend not expected to change in the near future.
With this being the case, it makes even more sense for dairy farmers to move on cull cows sooner rather than later.