Wesley Browne July/August Update 2025

Breeding

Wesley has been analysing his calving season from the ICBF calving performance report. Calving started on the 16^th February this year and finished on 27^th of May. 70 cows and 10 heifers calved down in total over the 14 week period.

The calving interval for the herd is excellent at 359 days, and well ahead of the target 365 days. Wesley was delighted with the good spring this year which allowed him to turn cows and calves out to grass within a few days of calving. This helped to keep his mortality at 0% due to less infection risk outdoors. He also watched cows closely at calving and was there to provide assistance if needed. However the most important task he did was to make sure calves were fed colostrum within 2 hours of birth where possible.

With 3 sets of twins and an excellent calving interval, Wesley’s calves per cow figure stands at 1.05 for 2025 which he is thrilled with. 80% of his heifers calved at 22-26 months of age and the 6 week calving rate for the herd was 60% which is on par with the national average figure of 57%. There were no recycled cows carried from one breeding season to the next as Wesley routinely sells any cows that are not in calf.

Seven cows calved in May which prolonged the calving season to 14 weeks so these will be the biggest focus for getting back in calf quickly to reduce the calving spread for this year. However he has made progress this year as that is less than half the percentage of cows that calved in May in 2024 (9% vs. 22%)

The herd will be in on 21^st July for the annual TB test and Wesley plans to scan the cows and heifers that week too.

Figure 1: Cows and calves at grass

Grassland

Wesley has been looking at making more permanent paddock divisions in his fields to reduce labour.

His largest group size is 35 cows wit 35 calves and 1 stock bull. His ideal paddock size is 1.4ha for stock to last 3 days. His current paddock size is 1.16ha and ranges from 0.28ha to 2.3ha. He has come up with a plan to divide some of the bigger paddocks in  away that will make further paddocks more accessible when moving stock, and will mean that he can cut some of the hillier fields for silage if needs be. Some of these fields already had temporary divisions in place regardless. The best shape of  a paddock is square or rectangular where possible.

He has also been considering water trough replacement and must also take into account the gravity pull in some higher fields. The standard recommendation for water trough size is 5-7 litres per LU which equates to 318 litres in total, or a 90 gallon trough per group. Wesley plans to locate these in a position that will allow for further subdivisions of paddocks.

Figure 2: Draft map for new permanent paddock divisions (in red) with new water troughs in blue

Performance

Two cull cows were sold in the mart on 21^st June.

Twenty bulls have been finished up until the beginning of July. So far they have averaged 419kg carcass weight and graded U=3+ at 15.2 months of age. They have averaged €3242 each. 20 bulls remain to be sold over the next 6 to 8 weeks.

28 of the bulls were weighed on 23^rd June. They averaged 668kg and had gained 1.71 kg/day since their previous weighing on 2^nd June.

Figure 3: Some of the finishing bulls