Dairy Calves 2024

Looking for a bit of advice, I want to sell calves tomorrow and haven’t got text regarding bvd. I checked icbf and showing negative. Is it ok to go to the mart without receiving the text. Thanks

Cheers for that, will do

Well they are getting it from some system. It flags up if they are not tested or positive.

If I was @Lios67 I'd tell them tomorrow when the calves are being taken in and show them the screenshot and about the text. I'd be 99% if it's on icbf negative it's on the marts system.

Thank you

Will exporters resume buying immediately

Friday I was told, that's the normal day for around here

Some quare carryings-on around the country now, the New Zealand influence has scarred our proud dairy farming culture.

That said those calves probably have a better chance where they're going, and the farmer knows it, better than a lot of other stories.

Yes it's a good idea BUT not legal

From 2005 onwards the minute large numbers of dairy ag students who are now today's farmers got indoctrinated to the booby calf system when out their on placement that dye was cast, now co-ops are bringing in over the top rules for 2024 to force the above to change their ways, but of course the 95% of dairy farmers who were doing their calves half right are now caught having to comply aswell, will the co-ops actually suspend milk supply from next year to lads who don't follow the rules is another hornets nest

There is a dairy farmer near me and he had an arrangement with another lad in that the second lad would take all the bull calves at 10 days free of charge, but he had to take them all exactly on the tenth day. The second lad would rear them until they were off milk and then sell them as runners in the mart and on Done Deal. Dealers were buying them an putting them into lads around this time of year that needed cattle for 7 months and then they would appear back in the mart in October / November @ circa 100 kgs and 4 -5 previous owners.

I met the calf rarer in the mart recently buying decent quality calves, I asked him about the calves he normally got from Gerry, he said he lost his shirt on it last year and would never do it again, left with a lot of bad calves that he couldn't sell once off milk and ended up feeding some of them for the winter & only in the last few weeks got rid of them at less than €400 each. Something need to be done about these poor quality cattle as it doesn't pay to feed them to beef especially in the first year.

Is there not a bit of personal responsibility comes into this too? I rear calves and the one thing I don’t do is buy a calf I’m not happy with.

There’s no dairy farmer holding a gun to any calf rearers head to take their calves. If every calf rearer only buys the calves they want then the dairy farmer should end up left with the poor calves and it’s not the concern of any other farmer if the poor ones then have to be reared on the dairy farm.

The real issue with your neighbours story like that, (although this probably doesn’t apply directly to the calf man in your story as he is now buying decent calves in the mart) is the calf man thinks he can’t lose getting the calves for free so gets a bit greedy and takes all he can get.

A lot of the time that works out profitable so fair enough. There’s one bad year then and it’s all the dairy man’s fault. I’m sure the calf man doesn’t go back to give the dairy man an extra cut of the profits when he’s doing well from the arrangement so no point complaining when there’s one bad year.

If the dairy man’s calves aren’t up to scratch then don’t take them off him and you can’t lose money on them then. It’s as simple as that.