New opportunities

He produced a book in 2013 it's available for 270 euro. I hope there is a lot of pictures in it.

I'm only joking. Farmers will be the first to jump on all sorts of energy projects but it has to led by the authorities. I mean planning and connection to the energy grid, grants ect. I'm watching a neighbor building his dwelling house currently. Its head melting how hard it is to do business in Ireland these days

Without addition of other feedstocks, the anaerobic digestion of slurry and farmyard manure has a poor performance on farm , with a high capital cost, low energy yield and absence of gate fee. One farmer in germany told me they'd need a gate fee to take slurry compared with sugar beet. These guys were running two 500hp generators and had them contained in shipping containers and pumping the hot air off them in to a firewood drying kiln

I wonder will the type of cattle have to change with this new proposed 24 month slaughter date. Does this suit Hereford and Angus type cattle?

Dairy herd. Another way to kill off sucklers.

As I posed in the bolloxolgy thread Teagasc have been proposing this for the last few years. I have no issue with the dairy herd/farmers but it is beginning to look like one sector is been sacrificed to save the other - hopefully I'm wrong and this new proposed slaughter scheme will not penalise out of spec cattle.

sucklers calves are no problem to slaughter younger than 24mths, even charolais, we did it here, heifers kill at 20mths and bullocks at 22 mths (as soon as the retention on the beef premium was out). A ton of home grown barley and soya was all they were using apart form grass.

If you can't do it with sucklers, you needn't bother trying it with dairy calves

Seems it is that they want the average age of the kill to drop to 24 from its current 27. Across the State herd.

More AA and He should see that naturally.

It might not be as bad as it looks.

Otherwise,yeah, it would be a real drive em on hard system.

It's purely methane emissions they're after with this measure.

Really can't make out how they can impose it. Unless a tax on age??

The thing with the AA and HE, is the quality of the some of the bulls being used needs to improve. Take the example of the angus KYA, he has driven down the carcase weight hugely, sole purpose of him was to reduce the calving interval and extreme easy calving.

I think calf to beef is going to stay and slowly get bigger with a reduction in the Suckler herd. With the export of calves under threat, this will really highlight the need for better quality genetics being used to produce a calf with an economic value.

Carcase weight limits at the lower end of the scale may need to be addressed, to facilitate the slaughter of some dairy stock at 24 months. It would be a big help if the 240kg dropped to 230kg to help some of these get over the line.

DNA sampling at birth is only a few years away and this will really help on a number of fronts as it should sort the potential quality and dirt out at a young age

Buy more bitcoin so cnoc lol!

That would just be greedy.