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Calf welfare, sexed semen and the viability of dairy calf to beef systems were all up for debate at a meeting in Claremorris, Co Mayo, on calf welfare organised by IFA.
Padraig French from Teagasc said that the number of calves born last spring was the highest in decades and yet the mortality rate was the lowest in years, indicating excellent welfare standards in Ireland compared to international standards.
However, he suggested that farmers should prepare now for increased numbers next spring.
Resources
“We have time between now and the spring for farmers to put the resources in place so that we can manage this problem. I don’t see the major reason for panic at this stage. I think it’s good to make people aware of it that there is a lot of calves coming,” French said
He had this to say on the future of dairy beef production in Ireland: “The beef industry is quite depressed at the moment and I think we have probably added to the confusion around the value of these dairy calves in how we have communicated the message about the value of dairy calves.
“We must remember that dairy beef production is more environmentally, more economically and more biologically efficient than suckler beef production and to produce 1kg of beef from the dairy herd costs somewhere between €3 and €3.30/kg. Now that’s probably close enough to the price being paid for a kilo of beef from those animals at the moment, but to produce a kilo of beef from the suckler herd costs about €4.20/kg and farmers involved in dairy beef production have that buffer that when beef price falls some of that loss in income is passed back to the dairy farmer.
Viable
“That option isn’t there for suckler farmers, so dairy beef production is still a viable enterprise despite all the talk that is being said about it, ‘that we shouldn’t touch these calves, or that these calves need €100 with them’, it is still a viable enterprise for a lot of farmers in Ireland and I think we need to get back to that message,” French said.
It is still a viable enterprise for a lot of farmers in Ireland
There were calls from the floor for a sexed semen laboratory to be established in Ireland. Head of ICBF Sean Coughlan said there were challenges with sexed semen from an AI industry perspective: “Ultimately, the younger genomic bulls are the ones that are in most demand and generally the sexed semen works better with the slightly older ones so that’s one problem. Second thing is that the yield in terms of the number of straws from a bull jump is less when doing sexed semen as you’re discarding all the male semen.
Challenge
“Part of the challenge with the evaluations is that there is some movement and some of the bulls will go up and down now the challenge is if you have a whole bunch of sexed semen from a bull and if that bull drops then you are left with that [semen]. It’s one thing to be discarding semen that’s costing €2 or €3 a straw to produce, but if you’ve paid €15 to have it sexed then discarding that can be a challenge.
“In that context, if we are going to have a sexed semen lab in the country, I do think it has to be an industry wide approach. The AI companies in the grand scheme of things are relatively small businesses and I think it needs to be a broad scale approach to de-risk that for them so that we have a cross-industry approach to get the lab if the demand is there,” Coughlan said.
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