Beef farmers should start walking away from dairy farmers whose calves have no commercial beef value (CBV), geneticist with the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) Margaret Kelleher has said.

Beef farmers are essentially buying in the dark if they’re buying calves which have no CBV, Kelleher said.

“If you genotype, you will have a CBV. If you don’t want to genotype for whatever reason, you can put down who you AI’d to and your stock bull – just make sure your stock bull is genotyped. If [calf rearers] start walking away from farmers that don’t have CBVs, that will actually encourage the dairy farmer quite quickly,” she told farmers at Teagasc’s dairy-beef open day in Fethard, Co Tipperary, last week.

Better value

Eamonn Phelan, a beef farmer from Cork, highlighted the benefit of CBVs when buying calves from dairy farmers. Having moved away from a suckler system, Phelan has been buying dairy-beef calves now for the last eight years.

He buys 200 calves every year (mostly bullocks) and finishes them at 25 months of age. A little over half of the calves he buys are Friesian, which he pays roughly €60/head for and the remainder are Angus, Aubrac and Hereford crosses. These calves cost nearer to €200/head.

“I love to get the CBV value when buying calves, if I had the genotyping I could say that one lad is worth €50 and another lad is worth €250. You’d be able to put a better value on them because they might look the same as another calf.

“The one drawback I’ve found with Angus is that you’ll have these little small Angus and a small carcase and you won’t make much money out of them.

“I’m trying to push them in the last few years to get them to use better bulls. There’s a huge difference between the small Angus and the good Angus,” he said.