The Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) has recently published a table on its website detailing the Commercial Beef Value (CBV) of suckler-bred calves born in 2023 by sire breed.
Earlier this year, the ICBF made information available on good, bad and average CBVs for cattle bred from the dairy herd for beef production.
While most farmers have heard of the CBV by now, some are still unsure of how it works and how to differentiate a good and poor CBV.
The table below gives a CBV comparison of suckler-bred calves born in 2023 across the main beef breeds:
As can be seen from the table above, the main continental breeds have the highest average CBV’s.
E.g., the average suckler bred Belgian Blue-sired calf born in 2023 had a CBV of €293, with the top 10% being greater than €341. The average suckler bred Hereford calf was back at €171, with the top 10% being greater than €216.
The CBV
The CBV is expressed as a monetary value. The higher the € value, the more profitable the animal is predicted to be based on its genetics.
Like the Euro-Star Indexes, the CBV has star ratings. There are ‘across breed’ stars which rank an animal’s value against the entire population and ‘within breed type’ stars, which rank an animal’s CBV only against animals of the same breed type.
There are three breed types:
- Suckler (beef sire and beef dam)
- Dairy x Beef (one dairy parent and one beef parent)
- Dairy x Dairy (dairy sire and dairy dam)
Naturally, the bar will be much higher to be a five star in the suckler category (min €296) than it is in the dairy x beef (min €133) and dairy x dairy (min €20).
The table below shows the CBV star rating percentiles across breed and for the three breed types:
According to the ICBF, the ‘within breed type’ star rating will help farmers to identify the highest genetic merit animals within the breed type of interest to them.
The percentiles will move slightly with every evaluation and if the national herd is seeing genetic gain, then the percentile (cut-off) values will increase.