How do Spanish beef farms compare to Ireland?

DairyBeef 500 advisor, Sean Cummins, is on this week’s Beef Edge podcast with interesting insights into the recent DairyBeef 500 farmer study trip to Spain. Over the course of the trip they visited a number of farms in the Catalonia region in the north-east of Spain, with the two main enterprises being calf to beef and suckler to beef.  The key differences between both systems were that farmers were focused on producing a product for the domestic market which is generally a paler meat, produced from younger animals.  One noticeable difference was the target carcass weights. In the Spanish system, lighter carcass weights are generally preferred, with premium prices available for animals producing carcasses between 220-240kg - carcasses that are often penalised here. Unlike Ireland, all animals are housed for the duration of their stay on-farm. Typical lifetime concentrate input per animal is 1.8-2t. Substantial numbers can be handled with very little labour input, typically you were seeing 1-1.5 labour units per 1,000 head on the farms visited. For more episodes from the Beef Edge podcast, visit the show page at:
https://www.teagasc.ie/thebeefedge 
 
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