Beef price tracker 2

I could not see that happening either. I rear a few and some of my outlying yearlings pay but to be honest the yearling heifers on the slats don't cover themselves. Not down here anyway. It's definitely costs over 650 last year including calf price to rear a yearling to 300kg. That's only feed. Lucky to get 700 for a heifer

Then why did the processors pay through the nose for cattle this time last year. Ya you could expect AA or HE as DNA testing could show a serious discrepancy but they flat priced QA assured Friesian's and other cattle as well.

Very few Friesian's are killed as bulls, yes this year a good few lads went back to the U24&U16 young bulls. However the numbers are still only 30% of the bull era of 10 years ago.

As for feedlot's getting into calf production you do not understand the system. There may be limited excursions but they are multiple limiting factors.

Mainly nitrates, no grazing and costs of infrastructure

So it’s the suckler man’s fault that prices are kept low for dairy bred stock (and all stock). Not to mention that for every suckler cow/farm that reduces it is absorbed by a dairy farm that moved to intensive production. Wager without looking that there has been more dairy cattle added in the last 10 years than sucklers have reduced.

Factories love one farmer blaming the other with poorly thought out theories.

And feedlots are going to buy caves and keep them 12-18 month rather than buy stores and finish in less than 3months. That brought the lols.

I don’t think so.

We’re about a third of the way through the silage contracting season now, based on our average annual bale count, and more than three quarters of people we’ve baled for went back to almost their normal rate of fertiliser rather than the reduced rate of last year and bale count is up on all farms as a result.

Silage was very scarce around here in the spring with lads buying from 50 plus km’s away and having to pay big transport charges so costing €50-€60 per bale in their yards and some of it being poor quality. No matter what the price of fertiliser it was going to be cheaper than that.

10-12 bales per acre is nearly the norm this year whereas this time last year it was 6-8 bales. The heaviest we’ve seen was a 10 acre field a farmer bales himself with an F5500 McHale and we wrap for him. He had 200 bales on the 10 acres. He was one of the men that had to buy feed last spring and was adamant that wouldn’t happen him again.

I know it varies around the country. I’m in regular contact with a small contractor in Roscommon and he had the complete opposite story in the spring and said there was no shortage of feed around him with everyone having surplus. But in the midlands the fertiliser use would have seen a big increase on last years numbers.

The factories as it stands can’t get enough feedlots to finish enough cattle to depress price. And a feedlot only holds cattle for a few short months.

Hard to see them finding enough calf rearers and store rearers (that would need to bring the cattle to 16-18 month) to get a production wheel rolling along the supply chain like that.

+1

Yea, you can't just drop fertiliser input for one year and then claim there's no difference in crops,

Some organic farmers think the same until the second or third year organic when low fertility starts to bite.

I know one organic farmer that trades cattle slurry from a local farmer and pays for equivalent fertiliser for the local farmer.... greenwashing

If you can control 10-20% of stock, you are a lynch pin. Just look at the effects of the 22%of the kill coming from feedlots. The price of beef in the UK and Europe has powered on, where are we, going backwards

The feedlots effect more than the small scale finisher, it also effects the store man aswell being able to depress the price.

I'm well aware of all that as I am on heavy land myself but the last 10% of stock that some lads are running shouldn't be there at all. They really suck the good out of the returns.

Agreed too, it's no surprise the factories will take on the roll of calf to beef rearing. They'll pay what ever along the line to each rearer, but they'll have the upper control.

If the milkman doesnt want to rear the calf, and the beef man doesn't want to buy these so called poor calf then Larry will take it on, at least till a Bobby system is introduced, but that's a different debate.

No, certainly not.

The drought last summer had a big effect here. I know it did in the south east too whereas along the western side of the country the effect was minimal.

Silage was being fed for 6-8 weeks during the summer here last year. When the rain eventually did come it was too late and grass never recovered. The wet autumn then had cattle in a month earlier than normal. That’s almost 3 months extra feeding. 4-5 months of winter feeding would be the norm here, that turned into 7-8 months last year.

If anything it was nearly the complete opposite to your comment was what happened. The higher stocked lads that put out their fertiliser in March/April and had their silage in the yard by this time last year were fairly ok as they had a bank of second cut and grazing grass built up before the drought hit. It was the lads forever giving out about teagasc that only decided to shake a handful of fertiliser in May for fear they’d have lost a euro or two’s worth of it in a shower in April that got caught as once they cut their silage in June/July there was no growth after that for the rest of the season really.

I haven’t bought the FJ any more than a handful of times in the last 5 years and I don’t have a teagasc advisor either so I’m not one for worrying about what they’d recommend. I go on my own knowledge and experience of my own farm and one thing for sure, like @wrangler alluded to above, you might get away for one year with cutting back on fertiliser, but by the second or third year the reserves in the land will be gone too and that’s where you’ll get into bother.

There’s no FJ or factory man putting a gun to anyone’s head and telling them what way to stock their farm. That’s all on the farmer himself. Whatever way a lad wants to stock his farm then he’ll have to grow the grass to suit. There’s no point thinking you can get away with no investment and then blame everyone else when you’re not making money from it.

If you feed it it’ll grow.

One of my dairy farming customers had 9 bales per acre during the week after spreading no nitrogen, only what it got from slurry, and he uses 0-7-30. He’s focusing hard on using clover the past 4-5 years and reducing nitrogen by around 70%. He zero grazed that field already in March this year.

We’re in peak grass growing season, any field closed up since March and not yielding 9 ton plus of fresh yield per acre now is either poor ground or poorly fed ground. If you don’t have the grass growing now you won’t have it for the rest of the year either.

If you’re waiting until June to cut silage then unless it was grazed up to the end of April your quality is poor whether you have 3 or 23 bales per acre.

Dropped a single heifer to liffey meats in bjd.not keeping track of prices as haven't hung anything since before Christmas. Its a long time since i seen as many cattle trailers dropping off stock. Assuming a pull??

A few comments here about fertility being ran out of ground after 2 or 3 years on farms that reduce inputs or go organic. It's just at that point where the land is coming out of its withdrawal symptoms from acidic artificial fertiliser and the natural biological N and nutrient cycling mechanisms, which were damaged and inhibited are kicking in again.

The cost of those marginal watery bales is actually quite high.

Someone wants €25 a bale for Silage for mowing, baling , wrapping and drawing in for bales of silage does this seem reasonable?

I'll probably be paying €18 per bale to mow, rake, bale, wrap, depends on the draw but if the draw is'nt massive that sounds dear to me.