Shane Keaveney, FutureBeef Farmer
Shane Keaveney, FutureBeef Programme Participant farms full time in Ballinlough county Roscommon with his family. They have a herd of about 37 suckler cows and are a spring calving herd.
The bulls are finished at under 16 months, and the heifers then are sold as forward stores. They have a very compact calving so the reason for that is you have a group of animals that's the same weight, same age, and from handling them, from doing simple tasks with them, they can all be treated the same.
The heifers are calving under 24 months and because they're all the same, you have a better choice from selecting the best heifers you have, you're not just going on weight. With your bulls then they're all going to factory within a month or six weeks and they're not strung out over two or three months and that group of stock can be treated the same with the amount of meal they're getting. If you had a group of stock that were varying ages, they'd be all on different allocations of meal. It's a huge saving from from a labour point of view. The last two years of a calving period has been just under eight weeks, which was fantastic.
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