I'm not sure of your situation Grass but in Stans case i see that he has 160 cows and is supporting 3 families with it. 2018 Drought id say was the killer for him with high ebi irish based bulls. He probably like alot of people was feeding them properly an not getting the return he was historically getting. I have high yielding cows and my feeling is , yes there is more work but when grass availability becomes a problem im considerably less stressed.
But do you really think it works??
here’s a cow with only and index of 11 for fertility and she has a 361 day calving interval she also gave 937 kg ms last year
if 11 for fertility is producing 361 day ci why are teagasc pushing fertility figures of 200 plus
or is it just so profitable farmers like myself can’t get bulls into stud and instead they are spreading the money to lower systems
You can't take that fertility figure seriously with a reliability of 33%.. surely you know that
What milk did the current top ebi bulls dam produce last year ..........anyone hazard a guess
8000kg
I didn't ask what ther restvof her family produced collectively now Stan 🤪🤪just herself.
I'll give you a hint but you're probably well aware that it's under 4000 kg of milk for the year ...............I've seen Angus cows produce as much.
I do think it works. Stan wants milky cows so let him breed that
i want a herd of cows that does high % at modest litres and that can do it off grass. and I am getting that. We do somewhere between 540- 570 kgs ms the last 4 years or so at 3.75-3.8 % protein
The higher you go with litres the more you need to substitute grass to meet the energy requirements she has. Lads then go and complain that cows can’t do it off grass, of course they can’t. They can only take in so much grass during grazing
F**k me is all I can say
The original 0 ebi cow was supposed to do 1350 gallons in old money
Don’t you feed maize and wholecrop….and your highly stocked and suffer from summer droughts ….at a guess your feeding 1.2/1.5 tonne plus depending on year
this grass fed cow is a myth years like 2018 and last year prove it ….when grass don’t grow you feed heavy small high ebi cows don’t pay you back ….this 18 kgdm intake is also load of codswallop ,most cows need more than that ….
A good goat 😲😲
What’s your stocking rate on MP?
Ya I agree wholeheartedly it is a complete fabrication and a pipe dream all that's between 4500 litres and close to 8000 is about 350 kgs of meal
And them figures are manipulated that I know for certain as I got it first hand from the ai company
I want milky cows with high solids big difference- if ebi is working why aren’t the low yielding cows doing better % than my cows consistently
over Christmas I showed that when you compare a herd like mine to a typical spring calving system not feeding maize etc you would nearly 2million euros worth of investment to have the same profit
If your doing that with grass and no maize, meal, wholecrop,etc your in the best farm land in the county with the best climate.your also probably in the top few herds in the country never mind the top percentage
Breeding has an awful lot to do with that too how long have your herd been pedigree at this stage 40 years plus? That’s an awful long time ye have been fine tuning your herd to where you are today. That will have a fair bearing on things also when making comparisons between the two systems.
What sort of a cow was she supposed to be I've cow with an ebi of 5 she's just done over 8k and delivered 720 kg of solids at roughly 1.4 ton of meal
I do feed whole crop and maize but that’s mainly been dictated by not being able to get ground on long term leases and it’s easier to buy in maize than a crop of silage around here
the plan this year is to get back under 1t of meal per cow, cut out the silage feeding during the summer and autumn and replace the extra meal and silage we’ve been feeding with zero grazed grass and just keep the10 ac of maize well grow for the spring. Maybe it won’t do what I’m hoping it will but I’m fed up of feeding high levels of meal when they would do the same milk if there was enough grazed grass available for the cows
Used two well bred high ebi stock bulls here the last few years to mop up, 300 plus ebi but their from really good cow families current bulls dams milk records for instance are excellent
Why do the icbf keep scoring s**te at the top of the pile when theirs miles better available
The scoring is completely skewed in favour of the Irish smaller cows
I'm planning to get down to a ton per cow here this year including what's fed in the dry period and I'm planning to produce 9500l per cow ............. now we all know how plans work.
Anyone know how the dairy clearance sale went in fermoy today.
You’ve completely different cows to me though. I like a smaller type cow that we have and they’ll do what I want off a predominantly grass based diet, I’ve gone off that the last couple of years and want to get back to it as close as possible now but I still see us feeding 900 kgs of meal or so
I don’t want 10000l, I don’t like Holsteins or fleckveighs.
my point being is I know what I want and I’m getting it
yer all critiquing ebi and Irish genetics but ye don’t use it or want to use it
I’m not on here complaining about lads using American bulls etc
There was a poster on here before who had a cow that was negative in her milk score.
He could never figure it out….. until he spotted her sneaking into the dairy nightly and dumping a few litres of milk out of the bulk tank…..
I can never figure out what ICBF are at regarding EBI. Their figures for bulls are all over the place especially for imported bulls, it is like they pull the figure from the air. Munster genetics imported some straws of 3 Brown Swiss bulls for me a few weeks ago. The bull with the best figures for milk in Switzerland converted to the worst of the 3 in Irish figures. They were genomic. I asked the lad in Munster how this could be and he said they used the genomic figures for only 20% of the proof and the rest was got from parent average. Just goes to show what ICBF think of genomics.
Good luck with tgat plan but your highly stocked so fairly ambitious .the z grazing experiment will be interesting ….won’t be much help in drought tho and the time involved cutting it and shoving it in etc …..top quality silage much easier
Have you bought a zero-grazer yet, contractor here is giving it up, and weighing up my options re buy a wagon, already have front mower our go with a zerograzer
Unless you drop your sr tgat ain’t possible
