Queries about farming

irishguy19772

New enough to farming and just some basic questions were bothering me. Thanks for any clarification.

1) why do dairy farmers not keep calves and sell them as runners and make some money on them. If they are flooding the market with calves for half nothing, isn't this making life very hard for the suckler farmer. Or are calves off fresians not as desirable?


2) we keep bull weanlings each other. We don't squeeze them and usually sell once they are around 6 months - maybe up to a year depending if they are spring or autumn calves. If selling without squeezing would you have less buyers?


3) we have a limousine bull. would it be stupid to buy a pure bred shorthorn or Angus to breed with it. Looking at cow and calf for 2200. So if buying would I be silly not to do AI.

Appreciate these are very basic questions but I said I may as well ask as I am not sure. Thanks for any advice.

TooOldBoots

1) Calves (especially the bulls/bobby calves) are a bi-product for the dairy farmer, they just want to produce milk.. In a lot of countries they shoot the dairy bulls. Here we are lucky enough to have an export market for the calves to be fed on to veal.

2)Usually more buyers for bulls as the good quality Weanling can be finished for killing in as little as 18 months

3) Shorthorn or Angus are used only for cross-breeding with dairy stock now days.. They are easy calving and the calf can be sold on at a better price than a dairy breed. They just don't perform as good as a beef breed on there own as they are smaller and less efficient feed converters

irishguy19772

Thanks for responding. Those answers makes sense.