Store cattle are purchased at 16-plus months, to finish at the 250-acre Gop Farm at Trelawynd in Flintshire. More than 1,300 store cattle are bought in each year for the unit and these are carefully sourced from specific local farms.

The presentation focus is how I use EID to closely monitor all aspects of cattle performance. One figure referred to is £37,000, which represents the equivalent of a 0.1kg increase in the daily liveweight gain of the finishing groups over a 12- month period. I feel that we cannot be dependent on having an increased finished price for our product. Many countries are already producing beef cheaper than the United Kingdom. It is up to us to make the Beef industry sustainable for the future, we need to be far more efficient and concentrate on genetics that will improve performance.

Steers and heifers purchased for Gop Farm are weighed on arrival and every 20 days thereafter. They spend an average 145 days on site, before being sold deadweight, with about 25 head sent to the abattoir on a weekly basis. Most end up on the shelves of Morrisons supermarkets.

A transition diet is fed to stores for the first 55 days, followed by a precisely formulated finishing ration, which is made up of grass silage, straw, sugar beet, bread, soya hulls, ground maize and limestone flour. It also includes Trafford Gold, a wheat processing by-product containing starch, glucose syrups, wheat gluten and alcohol.

The genetic potential of cattle is something of a pet subject with some firm opinions on breeding. People talk a lot about breeds, but my concern is to find the best animals within those breeds. In my region, most store cattle are crossbred, but within the composite are breed examples that can be the best or the worst, in terms of genetic potential. As an industry we should be concentrating on the best and breeding from the best.

I mainly buy from a couple of local auction marts and because I closely follow the animals’ performance, a picture has emerged, highlighting the farms which consistently breed the type of cattle which suit my system.

I have always been able to pin down the majority of my costs, such as machinery depreciation and feed inputs, but EID has simplified the process of determining the exact amount that the cattle enterprise is contributing towards total farm income.

Monitoring performance in this way means that I quickly become aware of any animal which is not meeting my targets; I need to achieve an average 1.1kg of daily liveweight gain, in order to cover my feed costs, for example. Therefore, I will sell the poor performers earlier; otherwise they will be costing the business money.

Selecting cattle has changed over the years at Gop Farm, traditionally cattle were picked on appearance alone. Now however, with the help of EID monitoring, the best performing cattle with a good daily liveweight gain are selected to stay longer on the farm to exploit their potential.

The average killing out percentage of my cattle is 54, measured on a full gut. But I feel it is unwise to put too much emphasis on killing out percentage. A single individual may have a relatively low figure, but as long as its target daily liveweight gain has been achieved, it will have served its purpose. One of the key elements to stress is that if an animal has poor genetic potential, it does not matter what I feed it, it will not help my business if it cannot convert that feed into weight.

In 2015 I was awarded the Farmers Weekly ‘Beef Farmer of the Year’ and Gop Farm is a former Wales Farming Connect demonstration unit.