Wesley Browne July/August Update 2026

Breeding

The cows that were running with the Limousin bulls were scanned on 20^th August. One of the Limousin bulls went lame during the breeding season and Wesley was concerned that it may have affected his fertility but 35 cows are scanned in calf nonetheless. Five cows are to be re-scanned and the heifers are to be checked also. Potentially there could be 33 heifers and 70 cows in calf (excluding culls) amounting to 103 females in total.

Figure 1: One of this year’s calves from the Limousin bull with his dam

Figure 2: This year’s breeding heifers

Wesley has planned for the calving season to start 10 days later in 2027 and delayed breeding this year accordingly. This year’s poor spring, combined with difficult calvings in heifers to the Angus bull and a mixture of various health issues in cows and calves are the reasons for this decision.

Seven cows and 2 heifers have been selected for culling and will be sold at the end of September after they are fed ration for approx. 60 days. Some later calving cows (May/June) were bred to the Limousin stock bull and Wesley plans to sell them live rather than keeping them on himself which will help to tighten next year’s calving spread.

Performance

The last load of finishing bulls were sold on 26^th August. 41 were sold in total this year, with factory data available for 28 of these. Their average age at finish was 15.7 months and they averaged 403kg carcass weight, graded U-4- and made €2683/head on average. The final report will be included in the next update for the remaining bulls. The final group were eating 10 kg of ration/head/day along with top quality silage.

Figure 3: Some of this year’s finishing bulls

Four heifers were also sold at 24.9 months of age at 331kg carcass weight, graded U-3= and made an average price of €2235 per head.

Wesley’s Beef Benchmarking Report came available on ICBF on 27^th June. It runs from April 2025 to March 2026 and summarised the finishing performance of 41 young bulls that were sold during that time.

It showed the following data:

• Carcass weight: 424kg (national average 406kg)
• Carcass conformation: U= (national average U-)
• Carcass fat: 3= (national average 3-)
• Age: 467 days (national average 569 days)
• Lifetime ADG: 1.45 kg/day (national average 1.16 kg/day)
• GHG output per kg carcass weight: 8.52 (national average 10.2)

It also compared the finishing performance across the commercial beef value (CBV). The top third of the CBV animals (€536) had a higher lifetime ADG at 1.53 kg/day vs. 1.35 kg/day than the bottom third (€370) when finished. They also had a heavier carcass weight of 450kg vs. 393kg, graded better at U+ vs. U= and were finished 4 days younger at 465 days vs. 469 days of age.

Figure 4: CBV vales of beef x beef heifers finished April 2025- March 2026 (Source: ICBF)