10 December 2023
Future Beef Farmer Ed Curtin demonstrates his housing and handling facilities
Ed Curtin farms in partnership with his mother Breda in Rowels, Meelin near Newmarket, Co. Cork. He runs a suckling to weanling system consisting of 24 autumn-calving suckler cows.
The males are sold for export while the heifers not retained for breeding are sold for export or sold in show and sales in the local mart. Ed is using 100% AI to allow him to use the best genetics available.
He has a split farm, with 34ha of heavy land around the farmyard. Due to its heavy nature and the system of autumn calving, the home farm is mostly used for two-cut silage and calving the cows in the autumn
Ed also buys in 51 dairy-bred (AA/HE) calves every year and brings these through to slaughter or sells them in the mart as forward stores. Ed has 11ha rented 25km away and this is drier than the home farm; therefore, he concentrated on paddocking this land first and uses it for the dairy beef system. Currently there are 24 main divisions on the farm, with the ability to split fields with temporary fencing.
Ed’s plan is to stay at the same cow numbers but to improve efficiency on farm through increasing the number of calves per cow per year and liveweight performance at grass.
Health & Safety
Ed decided to invest in a new cattle shed in 2017 with a TAMS grant to modernise his facilities, increase slurry storage for the 6 month plus winters that he faces, to allow safer handling of stock, to reduce labour on the farm and to provide more lying and feeding space for his growing herd. He built a 5 bay double slatted tank which has mats installed. He also added a roofed cattle crush which includes a number of features to allow for safer handling of cattle (see video below). The suckler cows are housed in this shed and their calves have access to a separate slatted lie back area. The maiden heifers and the dairy beef weanlings are also housed in the shed.
The older 3 bay slatted shed was built in 2010 and is used to house the dairy beef yearlings for finishing. Ration can be fed at the back of the shed via pull-out doors that can be closed afterwards to prevent draughts from the prevailing wind.
Figure 1: Pull out doors for feeding ration to the finishing cattle
Working full time off farm and having a young family means that time and safety are very important to Ed and he adds, “I adopt an approach to keeping the place tidy as you go to reduce the risk of trips and falls.”
See video below where Ed demonstrates some of the safety features on his farm.
Ed’s safety features include the following;
- 180o forcing gate to safely move cattle towards the crush
- A pedestrian gate to access the pen
- An anti-backing bar,
- A head gate to restrain animals
- A head scoop
- Gated panels alongside the crush for ease of access
- A gated yard for ease of movement when cattle are released from the crush
- Locking head barriers where the cows eat silage which he uses to AI the autumn herd and to inject, vaccinate or bolus cows
Breeding docile cattle is also important to Ed for safety reasons and to reduce labour on the farm. He has culled hard in the past for flighty and/or dangerous females.
This article first appeared in the Teagasc Future Beef Newsletter