16 April 2025

Ger McSweeney’s desirables in his next generation of cows

Breeding for the 2026 calving season has commenced on Ger McSweeney’s Future Beef farm in Millstreet, Co. Cork. With 100% AI used, Ger focuses on a number of desirable traits when breeding the next generation of cows for his herd.

Milk, but not too much

Ger wants a cow with plenty of milk to rear a calf, but not too much. Where the latter occurs, young calves may be unable to completely suck out the cow, leading to problems with mastitis in the early spring period.

When selecting sires to breed future replacements, Ger focuses on the sire’s PTA (predicted transmitting ability) for milk, with 8-9kg targeted. Once the PTA goes into double figures, Ger finds that problems with mastitis tend to occur in early spring. These sires are also carefully matched to the cow, with the average PTA of Ger’s cows for milk being 9kg. Cows with lower PTAs for milk are matched with sires with strong PTAs, and vice-versa.

Fertility

Fertility is the bedrock on which a successful suckler system is built. Ger’s aim is for his cows to go back in calf each year and to produce a calf per cow per year. To help this, he focuses on sires with a negative PTA for calving interval, which when combined with his herd’s PTA of -1.8 days, will allow the calving interval to remain compact.

Carcass weight targets

Along with focusing on quality, Ger pays specific heed to the carcass weights of the sires selected. Finishing bulls under a 16-month system, Ger’s primarily paid on carcass weight, with carcass weights greater than 400kg desired, and conformation.

The terminal bulls selected have carcass weight PTAs of approximately 34-40kg, but they must also be easy calving. The herd PTA for carcass weight is 14kg, so cognisance is also paid to this trait when selecting replacement sires; this may be increased by using high replacement sires, which are strong on carcass weight also.

Docility and bull teams

Ger wants his cows to remain docile and to do so, bulls must have a high PTA for docility. Additionally, to ensure that the above-mentioned traits are delivered, a bull team will be used to negate any changes to current evaluations and to ensure a higher reliability for the given traits.

The most used breeds in the herd are currently Simmental (SI2152) and Limousin sires (LM9655, LM8259) for replacements, Charolais (CH4321, CH4159) sires as terminal sires, and Angus sires (AA4089) for heifers with a high reliability for calving ease

Ger McSweeney discussed his breeding programme at length as part of the recent Future Beef webinar on ‘Breeding the Ideal Cow’, which is available to view below:

Find out more about the Teagasc Future Beef Programme here.

For more information on Ger McSweeney’s farm, visit here.

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