National Breeding Event on Future Beef farm

National Breeding Event on Future Beef farm

 

By Charlie Devaney,

Beef Advisor,

Teagasc Castlerea.

 

A National Breeding event/walk will take place on the farm of Shane and Grainne Keaveney Ballybane, Ballinlough, Castlerea, Co. Roscommon on Wednesday the 27th of April at 7pm. There have been a number of articles about Shane and Grainne’s farm over the last number of months as they were selected to be part of the new sign post series that was launched by Teagasc recently. These are the farms that will be used to guide farming into the future as we strive to balance production and profit at farm level while also protecting the environment. There are farms within this signpost series from beef, dairying, sheep and the organic sectors.

This farm was the winner of the ICBF Euro Star €200 competition in Connacht/Ulster in 2019. This will be a brilliant opportunity to visit a farm that has an average calving interval of 365 days, close to one calf per cow each year and calves all of his heifers at 2 years of age. Not only is there a huge financial benefit to this but there is also a huge environment benefit.

I am a huge advocate of suckler cows on the heavier type soils that are commonplace in the West of Ireland and all along the western coast, but the question is how can we continue to do this in an environmentally friendly manner? If we can improve the breeding figures on our suckler farms then I think we can justify their survival if not then it will be a lot harder. At the event we will have Specialists from Teagasc who will talk about synchronization, sexed semen, use of AI and your Stock Bull and all forms of breeding. There will also be representatives from the AI companies and ICBF.

The usage of AI on suckler herds is less than 20% and presently there is very little sexed semen being used in suckler herds as there is very little sexed semen available. There is huge hope that this may change as there was a new lab set up in Moorepark Teagasc recently. This is the first one of its kind in Ireland.

Shane and Grainne are successfully hitting all the main performance indicators. They used a Charolais bull on their herd last year for the first time and the first crop of calves off this bull are now on the ground at present. There are 36 calves from 35 cows.

This is a great chance to meet Shane and Grainne and hear their story and to see the latest cutting edge information that is available for improving breeding on your farm. There will be a lot of information available from this farm over the coming weeks, months and years and this is a chance to join and follow them as they start out on their journey.

 

Teagasc provides a Local Advisory and Education service to farmers. They have offices based in Roscommon Town  (Tel: 090 6626166), Castlerea (Tel: 094 9620160) and Longford Town (Tel: 043 3341021), You can find us on Facebook @Teagascroscommonlongford, twitter @teagascRNLD and YouTube. And follow the hash-tag #RNLDwebinars for information about local farm webinars. Email; RoscommonLongfordAdvisory@teagasc.ie