Exited Suckler Cows

The quality of them or should I say quantity of quality 50 years ago was the difference though imo.

Square Traditional BritishFreisianXHereford calves landing up by the lorry load to market towns in the North West.

To get the same sort of stock at a reasonable price now you've to go to the calf marts or direct to a dairy farm down south yourself and that's no easy task.

Anything quality this year off a west of Ireland based calf tangler was a rob and when ya couple that with the price of milk powder, crunch and doses it's a waste of time too.

Especially since plenty of this sort of stock especially the marginal quality ones will do their main growing/filling in the finishing stage and all you'll have done is get the midlands/east based finisher a nice handy base of an animal to finish off his superior land, with a longer growing season and a shorter winter.

Finishing them yourself is the better option imo but only if you've the land to do it. Can be worked easier if you split the heard calves/weanlings on the more marginal land with the stores on the good land.

An agent will never let you have an animal that will leave a 1k+ gross margin in 12-14 months. You will not buy many but you will but a few every year. These are what pull yor average margin up.

The trick with drystock no matter what system you are in is watch your margin whether with day to day costs or when buying. When buying its most important if they come in right you have some chance if they start going out wrong because of processo price pulls. If you pay too much you can never recover your margin.

As well agents will sometimes buy another agents cattle at an inflated price and land you with them "shur that's the price of them ". Nothing wrong with agents they must maje a living as well, but I would prefer not at my expense.

You are.not completely stuck with it. You can cut the cows in half I think. You can use such a method to start exiting especially in the last two years of the scheme. Even at tgat some if the 2k is chewed up costs often "the first loss is the cheapest loss" so even deciding to take the hit on the 2k for last year and exit now may still make sense

You can drop your SCEP reference number of animals by 20% per year without any clawback on payments. You need to change the reference number early in the year if you are doing this.

Obviously your payment will also drop by 20%

Would you think that was common? Seems a bit unrealistic. We keep a few sucklers as well as the dairy cows here. Sucklers are a minor inconvenience really …. but I don't think anyone could conclude they take a lot of work compared to the milking cows.

A lot of us, smaller dairy operations got out in 1992/3. That year one could use the Fr cows to register for suckler quota. They then wouldn't count as sucklers the following year. Once off option made the decision for most people.

The majority we see getting out, which aren’t massive numbers but not a lot in sucklers around us either I suppose, are going calf to beef rather than buying weanlings or similar. There is probably more work in calf to beef in many ways but was mentioned in another post it’s (mostly) predictable work that can be planned.

Outside of calving, which is obviously a big one, the work load is not that high with sucklers really.

As for getting out, as long as dad is the main man we will be in sucklers as he loves them which I am happy with, our numbers have been creeping up really and new slatted shed going in this year somewhat geared towards sucklers so for the foreseeable we will be doing them. When the time comes where I have to be taking the majority of the responsibility though I am not sure calving will be manageable with a busy off farm job - if I could be mostly working from home maybe but even at that it’s a lot of extra pressure. Will have to see when the time comes - hopefully a good few years away yet.