Cork 'Angus Girls' win certified Irish Angus Beef schools competition

Clionadh, Laura, Aoife and Meadbh, better known as The Angus Girls, fought off stiff competition from four other schools to claim the overall title at the CIAB schools competition. The Leaving Certificate pupils studied the theme of sustainability while rearing the five certified Irish Angus calves that they won nearly two years ago.

Sustaining family farms through reducing labour and increasing income was a key element to their project as all four girls hail from farms in the Clonakilty area. They used the advantageous long grazing season to produce their calves, reducing the need for concentrate feed, harvesting forage in summertime, storage of forage, additional labour to bring feed to animals and removal of slurry.

To this end, they planted kale on the farm for winter grazing. They compared the cost and the workload of the housed animals against those out-wintered and measured performance, both physically and financially, of both sets of animals over each production period as well as over the entire lifetime of the animals. They found significant savings in the cost of production, but no major difference in physical performance.

Listen to an interview with the winners as well as Prof Paddy Wall of UCD who presented them with their prize in our podcast below:

The girls presented their findings to a number of agricultural events and to their local community through farm discussion groups.

Read more: Sacred Heart finish their Angus cross heifers

The runners up were:

We met the finalists as they received their calves at the National Ploughing Championship 2014 – watch their interviews in the video below:

A fresh set of students received their calves at last September’s Ploughing and are currently rearing them.