Winter Beef series: Targets for winter weight gain in cattle

Winter Beef series is in conjunction with Teagasc’s DairyBeef 500 Campaign.

Achieving daily live weight gain targets throughout an animal’s life on calf-to-beef farms is one of the key metrics used to measure the success of animal nutrition, grassland management, husbandry and health programmes.

As part of the DairyBeef 500 Campaign, the participating farmers are monitoring animal performance through weighing at key times throughout the year.

Regardless of the system being operated, the ability to achieve the desired levels of animal performance is a common trend witnessed on many of the top performing dairy-beef operations nationally.

Where weight gain targets – highlighted in the below table – are not achieved, additional costs may occur due to a longer finishing period, the production of lighter carcasses and/or an older age of slaughter; all three are potential negatives when the heightened level of farm input costs witnessed over the past 12 months are taken into account.

The winter housing period for 2022-born animals has now taken place on the majority of farms. With the return of animals to the farmyard for housing, there is an excellent opportunity to assess how animals have performed this year on your farm by completing a pre-housing weighing.

Developed over numerous years of research, Teagasc’s blueprints for dairy-beef production provide details on the key weight gain targets to be achieved at farm level to make the various strands of dairy-beef production a success.

Impact of under performance

When farms fail to meet the performance targets up until housing, there’s the risk of the system being penalised in terms of the potential returns achieved from the market either through higher input costs or reduced carcass weights.

Taking a Holstein Friesian steer, slaughtered at 24 months, as an example, an under performance of 0.1kg/head/day from the day the calf arrives on farm up until housing could result in the loss of up to 27kg of liveweight.

If this weight gain loss is not recovered between housing and the start of the finishing period next year, it could result in an additional 27 days of feeding during the indoor period to achieve the desired carcass output of 320kg/animal.

This represents an additional concentrate and silage input cost of approximately €82/head when concentrates and silage are valued at €410/t and 20c/kg of dry matter (DM), respectively.

If the decision is made to slaughter at lighter carcass weights, it may represent a carcass sales loss of up to 13kg/animal marketed.

Target weight gain

Once the performance up until housing has been assessed, the next step is to understand the targets required over the first winter period on farm, which ranges from 0.5kg/head/day up to 0.7kg/head/day, depending on the system being implemented.

Although these animals are capable of achieving a much higher level of daily gain over the winter months, a balancing act between animal performance and costs is required.

Research carried out in Teagasc Grange established that opting for moderate levels of animal performance was best to make use of compensatory growth – a period of accelerated growth next spring, once animals are turned out to high-quality grass offered on an ad-lib basis.

By availing of compensatory growth, there’s the potential to save in the region of 100kg of concentrates over the winter housing period when excellent quality silage is available. Where silage quality is poorer and additional hard feeding is required to achieve the daily weight gain target of 0.5-0.7kg/day, this concentrate requirement could easily double.

Critical to the success in achieving this target is balancing the quality of silage available to the concentrate being offered in terms of both quantity and quality offered. The starting point in this is completing a silage analysis.

An issue which occurs on many farms nationally is that weanlings fail to gain the minimum target for compensatory growth to occur over the winter months through under feeding, as the quality of silage in terms of dry matter digestibility (DMD) is over estimated or inadequate levels of meal feeding are supplied.

This means that once levels of average daily gain drop below 0.5kg/head/day and animals grow to slow over the winter months, its ability to make use of compensatory growth next spring is limited or reduced; thus leading to challenges in terms of meeting performance targets later in the system.

Along with ensuring that animals’ diets are balanced on the basis of silage quality over the winter months, a number of other factors must be considered to ensure the targeted levels of daily gain are achieved.

These include: Floor space; feed space; ventilation; access to clean and fresh water; and the implementation of appropriate heard health programmes.

DairyBeef 500

Given the large increase in the dairy herd in recent years and the resulting number of beef calves that will be reared to slaughter stage in Ireland over the coming years, Teagasc has established the DairyBeef 500 Campaign.

This campaign will incorporate a number of dairy-beef initiatives including: Demonstration farms located nationwide; a stand-alone demo farm unit in Co. Tipperary called Ballyvadin farm; a large emphasis on knowledge transfer with a particular focus on discussion groups; along with new dedicated dairy beef courses for farmers and a supporting research and education programme.

The DairyBeef 500 Demonstration farms are sponsored by Corteva Agriscience, Drummonds, Liffey Mills, Munster Bovine, MSD Animal Health and Volac. The Ballyvadin demonstration farm is sponsored by Shinagh Estates Limited and Dawn Meats.