Double muscled females often attract the lead prizes and prices at shows and sales up and down the country, but they do little if anything to improve fertility.

Add to that the increase in age before such animals produce their first calf, and there is huge potential to improve the number of calves reared from 100 beef cows when the average in Scotland is 82%.

These were just a few of the messages from Nuffield scholar, Steven Sandison, who runs 100 Simmental and Salers cross cows on 230 acres with a further 100 acres of seasonal lets on Orkney.

In attaining his scholarship, Mr Sandison, who challenged his own herd to achieve a 92% target weaning from a nine-week calving period, discovered there is a large variation in the top and bottom 10% of beef herds in the UK and in countries he visited which included Ireland, Canada, Sweden and Norway.

"The top seven beef farmers visited in the UK and Ireland produced scanning percentages of 95% per 100 cows, with calving percentages of 95% and weaning figures of 93%, which compares to the bottom seven which saw scanned figures of 91.5%, with calving and weaning percentages of 86.5% and 84%, respectively," said Mr Sandison.

Notably, the top seven farmers also produced such figures within a 9.5week calving period compared to the bottom seven which calved within 28 weeks.

He also saw a difference in the type of females used with double muscling types producing 86% at weaning with heifers are calved at 2.5years and within a 13-week calving period, compared to continental easy calving and or native-type females which produced 89% at weaning from calving heifers at 2.2years, again within a 13-week period.

"We have some of the worst weaning figures in Europe, so as industry we should be saying we don't want double muscling in our breeding females and we should be looking to calve our heifers at a younger age unless you are on a hill farm with slow maturing native breeds.

"The herds I visited that were calving their heifers at two years of age, weaned 89% of their calves and 62% of those were making money which compares to those who were calving their heifers at three years of age with an 87% weaning figure, of which none of them made a profit," said Mr Sandison, who has also seen weaning percentages in his own herd improve in a nine week calving period from an already impressive base of 89% in 2011.

In doing so, Mr Sandison is calving his heifers at two years of age and has no problem with fertility in such animals the following year.

He has also reduced the weight of his cows slightly with the aim being to have adult females at just under 700kg which he believes should be able to produce 50% of their body weight in their calves at weaning, without creep feed.

In the past year, Mr Sandison has also introduced soya to the diet of dry cows three to four weeks prior to calving, which has been shown to improve the quality of the colostrum produced.