Switching of feeding system transforms beef performance

It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing things as they’ve always been done and overlooking how they could be improved. 

This was the case on Plas Onn Farm near Welshpool in Powys, where father and son team, Martyn and Gruff Jones, admit they reared their beef in a similar way to their father and grandfather before them. This meant buying in weaned dairy x beef calves and selling most of them at around 18 months as strong stores. A group would also be kept until they were finished, often leaving the farm at up to 36 months, with killing out weights of over 400kg.

Stock were fed on a traditional ration including dry rolled corn which was grown on the farm and mostly handled in bags. Although performance was reasonably good and the enterprise made a margin, feed conversion efficiency inevitably tailed off as the stock aged. Rubbing salt into the wound was the gluten intolerance experienced by both Martyn and Gruff, who would be “bad for a week” after milling and mixing. And with some stock remaining on the farm for over two years, the cattle had to be kept in two batches by age, making extra work for the family team.

And then they saw the light!

By switching from dry rolled to moist crimped grain and buying a small, second-hand mixer wagon, both the ration and the system could be transformed. Grass silage also had the potential for improvement by taking an earlier cut, improving its preservation, and increasing its energy, protein and intake characteristics. As a result, a far higher quality ration could be fed whose palatability and high moisture would drive up dry matter intakes. And since crimped cereals are safer to feed than dry rolled corn, performance had significant scope to improve.

Reaching this position did not take long after the team’s first introduction to Kelvin Cave Ltd.

Martyn says: “We decided to try crimping as we’d heard of local people who’d done it successfully, so we tried just 10 acres in the first year.

“We bought the preservative, CrimpSafe 300, and a crimper – a Murska 350 – from Kelvin Cave Ltd. We shared the crimper with my cousin and made a small, temporary clamp out of two concrete panels for that first year.

“We liked how it went – we found harvesting moist grain was easier, although it required different settings on the combine. But our

contractor, David Evans, has a good understanding and was prepared to set things up properly.”

Aiming for a moisture content of 35-40%, there was a far wider window for harvest than with dry grain.

He says: “We find that as long as the dew has gone from the crop and you can walk through it with dry feet, you should be able to combine.

“We also gained an extra tonne to the acre, which is a big bonus,” he adds.

Explaining higher yields

Andy Strzelecki, technical director for Kelvin Cave Ltd, explains the better yields are seen on a dry matter as well as a fresh weight basis.

“These are partly, but not entirely, due to the extra moisture,” he says. “There’s a further bonus to come from less senescence and disease in the younger crop, which is harvested at its optimal nutritional value.

“Added to this are lower losses of the moist grain during harvest, which not only helps keep yields up but avoids volunteer barley the following year,” he says.

The family followed his advice to the letter, building two permanent clamps for the 2020 harvest, increasing their barley ground to 20 acres and setting themselves up to rear and finish more cattle through the following winter.

Livestock performance

In fact, it was the performance of stock which truly cemented the position of crimp on the farm, which has transformed the success of the beef business.

Martyn says: “We found the rations containing crimp (see panel at end of this field study) gave a lift in dry matter intakes, a massive increase in growth rates and better contentment in the cattle.”

“We’ve never seen the cattle so happy,” adds Gruff. “Before, they were far more fidgety but this winter, they’ve been lying quietly, chewing the cud, and when you add fresh feed, some of them don’t even get up.”

All of this is reflected in performance, with average weights at turnout this spring of 430kg.

“That’s closer to their weights at the end of summer in previous years, and means they’re easily six months ahead compared with the old system,” he says.

“This is our first year on the full system but it means we hope to finish a third before winter, to have only one year’s intake housed and everything gone by January, so clearing the shed for lambing,” adds Martyn. 

“But the biggest thing of all has been seeing deadweights come through at around 300kg,” he says. “This is down from 400kg, but at about half their previous age.

“We may still sell stores to capitalise on ‘green fever’, but now we don’t have to do so. If we had relied on this and gone down with TB, as we did 10 years ago, we would have been stuffed,” he says.

Uneven ripening

Further benefits he’s witnessed include the flexibility of the crop, which was demonstrated last season when patches of winter wheat were lost through waterlogging, but could be reseeded with spring barley.

“The winter wheat and spring barley could be harvested together without any detriment to the crimp,” he says. “If we’d been producing dry grain we would have had to use sprays to deal with the uneven ripening.”

Better quality straw is said to be softer and more palatable, suitable for both bedding and feed. And other agronomic benefits include earlier autumn cultivations and drilling before the winter sets in.