The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s new €20 million Beef Environmental Efficiency Pilot (BEEP) scheme will make some 400 sets of weighing scales available to participating suckler farmers.
We believe that the scales will be made available for loan in co-ops and marts at different locations across the country.
Farmers that avail of the BEEP scheme – but who do not possess a scales of their own – will be able to pre-book the equipment for a particular day, collect them and take them back to their own yard for weighing cows and calves.
Under the BEEP scheme – announced as a beef sector support under Budget 2019 – farmers will receive a payment of up to €40/cow-calf pairing for collecting weight data on cows and calves.
The pilot scheme, expected to target the weaning efficiency of suckler cows and calves, will measure the live weight of the calf at weaning as a percentage of the cow’s live weight.
It is anticipated that the data will be used to target improvements on a herd basis, by giving the farmer detailed feedback on the performance of individual animals.
It is also aimed at “incentivising” the collection of data not currently available in a significant volume to the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) under the Beef Data Genomics Programme (BDGP).