John Dunne July/August 2025 Update

Animal Health

John has started to prepare for weaning the suckler calves, by placing a creep feeder in the field with the herd since July.

He has also administered the IBR Bovillis and Bovipast vaccines to the suckler calves so that they have immunity built up in advance of weaning. This will help to reduce the risk of respiratory disease in them, and will also qualify for payment under the 2025 Beef Welfare Scheme.

The dairy beef calves received their booster against respiratory disease in the middle of July. Although they were vaccinated, some of these contracted pneumonia and did not recover from it. There was also an unusual case of listeriosis in one heifer who didn’t recover, and one suckler calf got a bad outbreak of maggots in its head, but is now recovering.

John is participating in the MARCS project to determine if there is any anthelminthic resistance on the farm. As part of this, he took a group faecal egg sample from the dairy beef calves and sent it for analysis to the lab. This came back positive for gastrointestinal worms at 300 eggs per gram. John then individually sampled 15 calves and marked them, recording the tag number on each bottle. All calves were then dosed on 26^th July with Albex to treat them for the gastrointestinal worms, and for lungworm as they were coughing a lot. John will then re-test the 15 calves individually after the recommended timeframe and the results will tell him what reduction in eggs have been achieved. If it is less than 95%, it would indicate that there is resistance to the ingredient albendazole on the farm, and if it is greater than 95% it means that the product is working.

Figure 1: The 15 individual calves were marked for re-testing

Grassland

Some of the fields along the river have significant amounts of ragwort this year. John is picking the plants as they are now flowering and disposing of them where ethe cattle can’t access them. Some other grazing fields have already been sprayed with Forefront-t as they do not have clover in them and John got them at the rosette stage. Care will be taken not to graze the sprayed area until the plants have fully decayed (usually 5-6 weeks) to avoid any poisoning of the cattle.

Figure 2: One of the fields that John has partially picked for ragwort

One other field is infested with redshank so a spray like Envy or Pastor trio would give moderate control as grazing does not appear to be enough to remove it.

Figure 3: Dairy beef calves grazing the field with the redshank infestation

The red clover is scheduled for its third cut at the end of August and got 2000 gallons of watery slurry per acre in mid July. One bag of 38% protected urea/acre was spread on silage ground and John is considering taking another cut off of this with the good growth.

Performance

There is only one batch of finishing cattle left to sell and John expects that they won’t be sold for another 6 to 8 weeks. They are being fed 6kg of ration per head per day at grass. One animal was treated for lameness so John will have to wait until the withdrawal period expires before it can be sold.

Figure 4: The remaining finishing cattle

Up until August 2025, John has sold 105 dairy beef cattle from the farm since January. 44 were heifers and they had an average carcass weight of 233kg at 24.2 months of age. They graded O-3+ and made €1544/head on average. The remaining 61 cattle were bullocks that averaged 294kg carcass weight at 26.8 months. They graded O=3+ and averaged €2257/head.

18 suckler beef heifers were finished at 29.8 months of age on average. They had a carcass weight of 303kg and graded R=3-, averaging €2215.

16 suckler beef bullock were sold at 28.2 months of age, and they had an average carcass weight of 371kg. They graded R-3= and averaged €2786 in the factory.

Four cull cows were sold on 2^nd July and they averaged 351kg carcass weight and graded R-3+.