Can vets really influence beef producer prosperity?

As farmgate beef prices collapse towards a five-year low, industry experts remain perplexed as to which direction producers are left to steer their businesses. The grave reality is that even the most efficient producers have limited capacity to affect the UK beef price, already cast in a gloomy shadow of global market turbulence, oversupply and stalling UK consumer demand (see the AHDB UK Yearbook 2015 - Cattle [1.6 MB PDF]), confounded by currency exchange rates and the odd food safety scandal! This further increases the emphasis on efficiency, through minimising the cost of production and optimising output or exploring alternative retail options.

Despite being potentially contradictory, these austere times for many farmers actually represent a critical opportunity to justify investment in professional veterinary advice and tweak their production systems further.

Measuring performance and weighing up the costs

Whether acting individually or part of a multidisciplinary farm team, vets are well positioned to contribute independent advice on cattle health, welfare and production. There are multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) which can be employed by the clinician to provide an indication of producer performance, one example of an effective parameter used in some suckler systems is the cost of production of a kilogram of weaned calf per cow served.

However, when considering the calculation of such a KPI, the proverbial ‘elephant in the farmyard’ may limit your progress. This is associated with the concept that the vast majority of the UK’s beef units still do not perform regular weight monitoring or recording of their livestock.

In any other industry whereby revenue is formulated on a DWt (deadweight) or LWt (liveweight) basis this would be a hair raising prospect, but for a multitude of reasons is the unfortunate reality of today’s typical beef enterprise. Arguably without weight performance monitoring in either suckler, and less dramatically in finishing systems, many KPI’s such as feed conversion efficiency (FCE) or monitoring of estimated breeding values (EBVs), for example 200 or 400 day growth, become devalued. For more information on FCEs see Feeding growing and finishing cattle for better return (1 MB PDF).

Ask yourself:

• How many of your clients own a weigh cell/bar?
• How many actually use it?
• How many of your clients involve the vet in calculating daily liveweight gain (DLWG)?

Investment in weighing facilities continues to be supported through intermittent government grant schemes to facilitate with the initial outlay costs and to help eligible producers generate meaningful data. This can result in critical information to coordinate nutritional, genetic, disease or breeding controls and form the key standpoint for creating evidence based herd health planning decisions in the field.

Initiating change with your clients

Convincing sceptical clients to change a management practice for which they may have performed for many years is also not without its challenges. If you have ever tried to change one of your own habits you may appreciate that it is not always straight forward! Critically before a management change can be initiated and effectively monitored the justification must be clearly identifiable with a sound foundation.

Partial budget analysis (PBA) is a useful tool to quantitatively model the financial implications of recommended interventions to clients, such as synchronisation, vaccination or nutrition programmes. These types of well balanced, planned approaches reinforce veterinary presence in economic decision making and together facilitate client understanding of changes within a beef system, whilst also avoiding a ‘wheel of fortune’ methodology.

Further explore the economics of the beef industry with Alex Walters at this Beefing up profits! CPD course on 15 June 2016 in Bristol.