As another calving comes to a close, farmers are turning their attention to bull choices for mating next year. We know how influential sire choice is on the performance of your replacement heifers, but what about the beef calves that leave your farm at four days of age?
There is huge scope to influence the performance of your non-replacement calves in the beef industry through sire selection too.
Fonterra Dairy Beef Development Manager Dr Rebecca Hickson has a wealth of experience in dairy beef breeding and production, and through her previous role as scientific lead on the dairy beef progeny test, understands the opportunities genetics has to offer dairy beef performance. She gives her top tips on things to consider when selecting beef semen.
Choose a bull, not a breed: there is no best breed choice
Instead, there are good and poor bulls within every breed, so be sure to look at the individual sires. Do not rely on a breed to deliver good calves.
Growth is king
The number one driver of profitability for beef rearers and finishers is growth rate. If you want your calves to be desirable to rearers, they need to have good growth potential. Data from the dairy beef progeny test shows you can increase the carcass weight of a dairy-beef calf by 34kg through choosing a top 10% sire. A calf from a high performing beef sire over a crossbred cow will outperform a calf from an average sire over a Friesian cow.
Calving ease + performance
Calving ease is non-negotiable, but it is only the first step of a high performing calf. You can have easy calving bulls that also deliver value to finishers. In the dairy beef progeny test, sires that produced calves that weighed 38-40kg at birth also had a range of 13 days in age at weaning off milk and 65kg in weight at 18 months. Selecting sires that have calves that are born easily and then grow out well will help you find repeat buyers for your calves.
Proof is important
Progeny testing is the best evidence of performance. Semen from a bull that has progeny recorded from dairy cows will give you confidence in the performance of the calves, and you can use that confidence both to make your sire selection and to market your calves.
Colour markings matter
The place for breed considerations is in the marking of your calves. Do you need colour marking to separate beef calves from replacements or will they be calving separately? The cattle store market still uses coat colour as a predictor of Jersey percentage as a proxy for growth potential (even though this is not reliable when calves come from crossbred cows), so coat colour can impact the value of your calves. Consider how your calves will colour mark with different sire breeds as this can impact the percentage of saleable calves you get.
How to find good semen
The information available to select beef bulls can be pretty hard to navigate, especially because data from one breed is not usually comparable to data from another breed. Your semen supplier should only be offering bulls that have acceptable calving ease and gestation length for dairy cows, so growth potential is the thing that will be most variable among the bulls on offer.
- Ask your semen supplier to recommend bulls that have good growth performance, with carcass weight and 600-day weight.
- Ask them to confirm that they are confident of the calving ease of the bulls in their catalogue.
- Ask them what evidence they have to support those recommendations. Don’t accept generalisations about the breed. Ask them to be specific to the bulls they are offering.
- Remember that your beef semen options are not limited to the same supplier as your dairy semen. Semen from other suppliers can be transferred to your regular technician.
For more information, talk to your semen supplier.