At the mart...

A strong diet of long rushes combined with specially adapted calendars and you too can have your bull weanlings to 430kg at 5 months. In fact the animal before this was recorded as being born on June 1st 2021 and weighed 450kg.

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Cattle showing is a great way of keeping your children interested in farming but it gets a bit frustrating when you face a long line of animals that did 3kg a day since birth. We have been showing animals since I was a small child and the emphasis was never on winning.
I'm genuinely surprised by that, I wouldn't be at many show and sales but even around an ordinary sale I'd have thought it was only an odd messer acting the bollox or some old person not up with their paperwork that would be at it.
 
I'm genuinely surprised by that, I wouldn't be at many show and sales but even around an ordinary sale I'd have thought it was only an odd messer acting the bollox or some old person not up with their paperwork that would be at it.
As a cattle man once remarked to me when an animal of questionable age entered the ring.. " I wonder what age he was when he was born"
 
As a cattle man once remarked to me when an animal of questionable age entered the ring.. " I wonder what age he was when he was born"
I heard it said once of cattle with similar questions around their birth cert that perhaps they had visited Tir Na nOg
 
To be fair, the older weanling bull all weighed properly but when they got to the last quarter, some of the may and June born bulls weighed a respectable 300 to 320kg but almost half of the last quarter in the class weighed weights that raised eyebrows. There was one June born LM bull that weighed 500kg. There was always the odd one at these kind of sales - i just have never seen so many.

They have only started selling the heifers. There's a lot of them and its oldest first so it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens.
 
A strong diet of long rushes combined with specially adapted calendars and you too can have your bull weanlings to 430kg at 5 months. In fact the animal before this was recorded as being born on June 1st 2021 and weighed 450kg.

View attachment 100113

Cattle showing is a great way of keeping your children interested in farming but it gets a bit frustrating when you face a long line of animals that did 3kg a day since birth. We have been showing animals since I was a small child and the emphasis was never on winning.
Is that Carrick, how was the trade.
 
You are making it easy if depf. of ag. get any notion to follow up .It happened locally where a farmer used register calves late they came in and skipped over 100 calves for no other good reason
 
How did they manage to prove it, you can suspect it, but that's not good enough in legal terms..

I suspect there was much more to the story
I wonder was this around the same time as a big breeder in the UK was caught messing with all his calves ages, parentage etc?
 
No man spends money like that without a lot of planning and thought. I have no doubt that she will be flushed to produce multiples of embryos.
Oh I've no doubt it wasn't done on a whim but I didn't realise there was a market for commercial stock genetics to that level
 
Oh I've no doubt it wasn't done on a whim but I didn't realise there was a market for commercial stock genetics to that level
There is quite a substantial market for commercial stock genetics in both Ireland and the UK. Id say that theres more commercial "show breeders" now than pedigree breeders. A doner cow can produce between 30 and 60 viable embryos in her lifetime so in the right hands, a heifer of this one's breeding could be quite valuable. She was well advertised before the sale and the buyer would have had her well checked out.
 
There is quite a substantial market for commercial stock genetics in both Ireland and the UK. Id say that theres more commercial "show breeders" now than pedigree breeders. A doner cow can produce between 30 and 60 viable embryos in her lifetime so in the right hands, a heifer of this one's breeding could be quite valuable. She was well advertised before the sale and the buyer would have had her well checked out.
Thanks, I didn't realise that. Is there a lotnof emphasis on icbf figures then or do lads just follow back the bloodlines of both breeds
 
Thanks, I didn't realise that. Is there a lotnof emphasis on icbf figures then or do lads just follow back the bloodlines of both breeds
Its a mix and match really depending on the breed. Some of the more muscle types wouldn't have great maternal scores. But on the other side, they'd have high terminal scores.

The big sellers yesterday were the limousins. They were all high scoring for maternal.

Some lads wouldn't be big fans of the star system. Its more down to them not understanding it than there being a serious flaw with the system. I see that the proposed new bdgp scheme for the new cap will have more of a focus on terminal indexes with a view to finishing cattle at a younger age. I can only say that the old bdgp scheme was good to us. We didn't try to cut corners by bringing in dairy bred animals but rather tried to breed all round better animals from the cows that we had. It brought big changes to the type of cows we have but also brought very positive changes to the quality of the animals going out the gate.
 
Its a mix and match really depending on the breed. Some of the more muscle types wouldn't have great maternal scores. But on the other side, they'd have high terminal scores.

The big sellers yesterday were the limousins. They were all high scoring for maternal.

Some lads wouldn't be big fans of the star system. Its more down to them not understanding it than there being a serious flaw with the system. I see that the proposed new bdgp scheme for the new cap will have more of a focus on terminal indexes with a view to finishing cattle at a younger age. I can only say that the old bdgp scheme was good to us. We didn't try to cut corners by bringing in dairy bred animals but rather tried to breed all round better animals from the cows that we had. It brought big changes to the type of cows we have but also brought very positive changes to the quality of the animals going out the gate.
There are many legacy issues with the star system, mostly around reliability and the lack of data on non Irish bulls. Not an issue for your average farmer but it's not a perfect system at all
 
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