| 2015-01-28 |    |
Driving Feed Efficiency in Finishing Beef Cattle
Feed is one of the main inputs of beef production and can amount to around 70 per cent of variable costs. Improving feed efficiency should therefore be a fundamental target for beef finishers.
There are four key areas where beef finishers can focus their efforts to do this:
Health and stress levels
Health problems, both past and present, can cause deterioration in
feed efficiency in finishing cattle. Potential problems include
parasites, pneumonia and Bovine
Viral Diarrhoea (BVD). A rigorous
health protocol for purchased cattle, or health plan for home-bred
cattle, will help address these issues. For example, calves that
have suffered from severe pneumonia will suffer from a long-term
negative impact on feed efficiency and reduce finishers’ margins.
photo: Jennifer Mackenzie
Body weight and composition
Body weight is a key determinant of feed requirements for maintenance.
As cattle get older and heavier their maintenance requirements increase.
This results in increasingly higher costs to keep them on the farm
regardless of how fast they are growing. Not only do younger cattle
have lower maintenance costs, but they deposit more lean tissue
in their liveweight gain than older cattle. This gives them a further
advantage in terms of feed use efficiency compared with older cattle.
Where older cattle are being finished it pays to aim for high rates
of gain to minimise days on feed. Cattle should be sent to slaughter
as soon as they meet target fat levels, as fat takes four times
more feed energy to deposit than lean tissue.
There are also differences in feed efficiency between bulls, steers and heifers. These are worth considering in conjunction with market requirements to make the best use of the resources on the farm.
Nutrition and growth rate
Reducing the number
of days to slaughter provides an obvious opportunity
to enhance efficiency by decreasing the amount of feed used for
maintenance. Simple improvements in forage and feed quality as
well as health management could help to improve growth rates
and reduce days on feed, with relatively little financial investment.
Genetic merit
Currently Estimated
Breeding Values (EBVs) for feed efficiency
are not available in the UK. But much international effort is
focused on exploiting the opportunity offered by selecting cattle
that are genetically more efficient in their feed use than their
contemporaries. Work to date suggests that improvement in feed
efficiency is worth more than four to eight times an equivalent
increase in growth rate to the industry. EBLEX and Scotland’s
Rural College (SRUC) have recently been awarded a project from
Defra that will collect data to enable the development of EBVs for traits relating to feed efficiency. The project will produce
a set of possible business models for the continued recording
of feed efficiency parameters.
If this and other research can provide the rates of genetic gain in feed efficiency that has been delivered for growth, then it will revolutionise the beef industry.
