Calving review and breeding season underway
- The breeding season is well underway
- 9 weeks breeding season planned with 2 stock bulls
- Calving review for 2025
Shane Keaveney May/June Update 2025
- Calf weaning
- Management after weaning
- Ration is being fed at 1.5kg per head per day in 2 splits
Calf management around weaning
- First 4 finishing bulls sold
- Finishing performance
- Ration levels increased for remaining bulls
Finishing cattle sales have started
Breeding
Shane has 43 cows and heifers running with either his Charolais stock bull or the new Saler bull this year. By day 16 of the breeding season, he had recorded that 21 females were bred in total. He will continue to monitor them and to watch for repeats. Both bulls will be removed from the cows after 9 weeks of breeding to keep a compact calving season for 2026.
Figure 1: The Saler bull is running with the heifers and most maternal cows
Meanwhile, he has been reviewing the calving performance for 2025. While calving was slow starting, the pace quickly picked up and the calving season ended up lasting 8 weeks and 5 days in total. One heifer and 34 cows calved in total from 18th February to 20th April.
The calving interval was 378 days, which is only slightly above the target 365 days. Mortality was 2.9% due to one dead calf, and the calves per cow per year was 0.94 which again is very close to the target 0.95. The heifer calved at 24 months of age and the 6 weeks calving rate was excellent at 89%.
Figure 2: Calving KPI’s for 2025 (Source: ICBF)
Figure 3: Some of the heifers that were born from sexed semen on the farm this year
Dairy Beef
Twenty of the dairy beef calves have been fully weaned since the 9th of May and are out at grass full time. They are being fed 1.5kg of ration per head per day in 2 feeds.
The youngest 10 calves are on once a day milk feeding. Shane is providing them with silage and straw ad lib, and has found that their intakes have increased dramatically since moving to once a day feeding. They are also eating 1.5 kg of ration per head per day in 2 splits.
They will remain grazing the paddocks around the yard for the summer so that Shane can monitor them closely. They are up to date with their respiratory disease vaccines and so far have shown no issues with scours or pneumonia since weaning.
Figure 4: 20 calves are fully weaned
Performance
The first two bulls were finished on 2nd May at 14.5 months of age. They averaged 388kg carcass weight and graded R+2+, making an average of €3035 each. Shane estimates that their kill out percentage was approximately 58% as he weighed them before they were sold. Two more bulls were sold on 3rd June at 15.6 months of age and Shane is awaiting final finishing data for them.
He was concerned that the remaining bulls were not performing as well as they should be, so he moved them up to ad lib ration since the beginning of June. He expects to have them all sold by mid-July so this will help to finish them quicker. Some of this year’s bulls have been finished off of 9.5kg of ration/head/day whereas last year all of them were finished from ad lib ration so this will result in a lower feed bill per head.
Figure 5: Some of the remaining bulls that will be finished before mid-July