Does beef data tell us any more about animal quality than the age-old skills of sizing up stock?
For generations, the experienced eye was the only metric farmers used to evaluate cattle. “He’s a great judge of cattle,” beef farmers would be heard saying of certain men at the mart. The art of ‘judging’ cattle has long been a highly regarded skill, with many noting that “not everyone has it”.
However, the status of such judges has been under pressure in recent years as farmers moved to peering up at the plethora of information on mart boards before making a decision on an animal.
This trend first appeared in the early 2000s when farmers would check if an animal had the required premiums for EU payments. And since then the data on age, movements and export requirements have all become important variables in evaluating an animal.
For suckler farmers, it has all been about the stars when it comes to choosing replacement stock since the 2015 launch of the Beef Data and Genomics Scheme (BDGP) a €300m initiative established to halt the decline in key maternal traits within the national suckler herd.
As part of the scheme, farmers committed to increasing the number of heifers in their herd that would be genotyped 4-5 star. To achieve this and to ensure payment under the scheme, the star rating of an animal became critical and started to significantly influence the value of breedretaining ing stock in the mart ring.
This drew the ire of many farmers who had for years judged cattle by their eye or how the individual cow had performed on their farm and not what it said on some board.
The scheme also came in for heavy criticism from breed societies, some of whom claimed it was reducing the quality of the suckler herd.
Noel McGoldrick, president of the Charolais Society, maintains the implementation of the BDGP scheme has not improved stock quality.
“Whether ICBF wants to admit it or not, the quality being sold through our marts nationwide is in decline and if we are to have any hope of
our reputation as a producer of top-quality stock here, change within the structure is needed,” he says.
Data analysis
It was with criticisms like this in mind that Chris Daly of the ICBF undertook an analysis of data from the first four years of the scheme to answer the question: ‘Did the BDGP programme really reduce the quality of cattle coming off the suckler herd?’
“It has been claimed by some that the ‘quality’ of stock coming forward from the suckler herd has been deteriorating and that this decline can be attributed to the emphasis on the Replacement Index since the advent of BDGP. My analysis shows clearly that this is not the case,” he says.
As part of the analysis, he looked at the performance of suckler-bred steers born in BDGP herds, which have been focusing on improving the Replacement Index of their breeding animals.
By limiting the analysis to the carcass performance of steers from these herds, the effect that improving maternal traits through BDGP is having on carcass traits can be examined.
“We choose steers coming out of
BDGP herds because if we took data from the entire suckler herd one could argue that animals outside the programme are holding up quality,” says Mr Daly.
“We focused on steers for the simple reason we have 900,000 suckler cows having 50pc male and 50pc female; the vast majority of the males are slaughtered as steers so that was the best cohort to look at. Females less so because a certain amount are kept as replacements.”
However, Mr McGoldrick disagrees and says a wider analysis, including young bulls and heifers, would provide a more accurate picture of the state of the suckler herd.
Age at slaughter
The accompanying table details the results of the ICBF analysis. The average age at slaughter was unchanged from 2015-19 and Mr Daly points out that there were two significant increases in 2018 and 2019.
“2018 saw very difficult weather conditions with a fodder crisis in the spring followed by a prolonged drought in the summer, while 2019 saw processing plants closed for long periods due to protests.
“These are environmental factors that undoubtedly affected the average age of slaughter of animals in