finishing heifers

leoch

i am thinking about finishing 8 heifers that i have, i put them in the slats recently and i am feeding(4 lick buckets of beef mix a day between them) this last month or two they are simx,limx chx and are from 18 to 21 months old and are about 480kgs to515kgs roughyl, what would be the best mix to feed them along with the silage and how much of it a day would they need to finish them say after xmas time or would i be better keeping them longer? sorry for all the questions but never finished cattle before, what weights would they need to be{600kgs-650kgs?) and i am not in any board bia scheme or anything like that any advise would be very much appricated thanks

dzer2

if its nuts then you are feeing about 28 kgs which is 3 kgs a day if you are feeding a course ration then thats about 20 kgs. You need to be feeding about 8kgs a day of 14 to 16 percent ration along with good silage should give 1.5 to 2 kg growth rate butcher heifers are 630 to 650 would be your best choice if possible.

epfff

Get board bia approved any factory will give ya form and its free no load to carry
as said by bob on another thread sell alive to stay alive
but if you want to see how its done id say 8kgs of hi maize ration/nut for 60 days stemmy silage is better for stomack

Farmer Pudsey

A lot depensd on your silage. If you have good leafy 70+DMD silage then 5-6 kgs will be more than adequate. At present they average 500kgs according to you. At this age these heifers are supposed to be nearly as efficient as bulls to convert food. The will eat 10kgs (2% bodyweight) of drymatter per day. I would be going for a 13-14% ration at most if you have good silage. Depending on price I would look for a high cereal mix with some fibre soyahulls if possible and a good protein source soya/distillers/rapeseed in it. They should do about 1.2-1.5kgs/day if they have the breeding. You will need to get them to 600kgs plus for to have a good level of finish on most however watch as they go overfat very fast. At that stage they should kill about 320ish kgs on average.

But I will wait for Bob to reply as he is an expert on heifers.

poor farmer

Weigh the buckets of ration that you are feeding .You would want to be feeding 8-10 kg/head/day ,preferably given in two feeds am./pm.
dry bales if you have them or straw.

leoch

thanks for the replies lads very interesting points there i dont think the silage is high in dm as when i opened the bale there was a fair pool of water out of the bottom of it but its the only silage i have,when u say butcher heifers do u mean try and get a butcher to buy them or is it there lighter weight or what and say they did kill out at 320ish kgs what would there final price be roughly

Farmer Pudsey

DMD is digestible dry matter it is the percentage of the dry matter of the silage that an animal can actually digest the rest ends up in the slurry tank. This is why s##te silage is expensive. Wet silage is not necessarly poor quality it is refered to as DM (dry matter content). However if you are finishing cattle and giving them a lot of ration the ration will make wet silage ferment again and go sour hence people think using stemmy silage is better.

This is not the case if you have well wilted silage that is leafy( above 70%DMD) but above 30%DM cattle will thrive on that alone and contintal heifers will do over 0.5kgs on that alone and if over 75%DMD they will do over 0.7kgs.

Butcher's usually tend to look for heifers that are of a british breed background (hereford and Angus) and that kill below 250kgs heifers above this weight are refered to as factorY heifers ( where I live anyway). If these are scarce they will take others.

Average contenintal heifers will grade ''R'' now in the R grade there are three sub grades R-=&+. R+ get a 6 cent bonus over the grade and Quality assured heifers another 6 cent. If under finished they may slip back to O+ which recives a 12 cent penelty off the base but you can still recieve your 6 cent QA bonus.

At present this translate's into between 4 and 4.1 euro/kg so a320 kg heifer would make 1280 euro less 12 euro's deductions approx