Over the coming two weeks, ABP Food Group’s Advantage Beef Programme’s farm liaison team is set to feature in a series of articles on Agriland which will highlight all aspects of sustainability in dairy calf-to-beef production.
The Advantage Spring Dairy-Beef Series will run on Agriland as part of ABP Food Group’s Advantage Beef Series which covers all aspects of the beef processer’s programme which offers beef farmers a 20c/kg Sustainability Bonus plus a dedicated support network through the Advantage Beef Programme’s farm liaison team.
Stephen Connolly is the agri-sustainability manager for ABP Food Group and a member of the Advantage Beef Programme’s farm liaison team.
He explained the Advantage Spring Dairy-Beef Series will feature a range of articles looking at different aspects of calf-to-beef production with a particular focus on getting the beef genetics right in a dairy calf-to-beef system.
The series will also offer advice to dairy farmers on which indexes and figures to examine when selecting suitable beef bulls for their dairy cows and what genetic traits the farmers who are buying these beef calves should look out for.
It will take a look at the latest updates from the ABP Demo Farm which is a functioning family run commercial calf-to-beef farm that buys in calves from the dairy herd and rears them to beef with the aim of finishing the cattle before their second winter.
One of the key aims of the ABP Demo Farm is to highlight ways farmers can improve the sustainability of their calf-to-beef enterprises, both environmentally and economically.
A key part of this is improving the genetics of the beef sires used on dairy cows when producing calves destined for beef production.
The demonstration farm has shown the link between calf sire genetics and calf performance on numerous occasions and has even demonstrated that progeny from sires with lower calving difficulty can have better beef performance, where the beef sub-index and carcass figures are higher but the calving difficulty is lower.
Working in collaboration with the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) and Teagasc, ABP has established the Gene Ireland dairy-beef programme which aims to identify the most suitable beef bulls for crossing on the dairy herd. These bulls are easy calving, short gestation and also have good beef traits.