SHARING OPTIONS:
Holding off concentrate supplementation until early- to mid-September resulted in fewer cattle being slaughtered off grass.
In the previous pages we have outlined what needs to be done to remain on target up to the final phase. Here we outline finishing targets for stock
19-month system
For cattle on target to be slaughtered at the end of the second grazing season, concentrate supplementation will more than likely need to be introduced from early August.
In recent years on the demonstration farm, introducing concentrates a fortnight earlier in the season increased the proportion of cattle slaughtered off grass and reduced the overall concentrate input compared to cattle housed for finishing.
Finishing cattle at grass on the Thrive demo farm last autumn.
It is often said that there is as much variation within a breed as there is across breeds, and looking at the production data from the Thrive demonstration farm for the 2019-born stock, this certainly holds true.
We must remember that this is a relatively small sample size and therefore we must be careful with any extrapolation of the data to a national scale. However, there are some positive outcomes from this dataset.
The first and most important of these is a positive correlation between the DBI, value of beef and the carcase weight achieved by the animal.