Gary Player is a retired golfer from South Africa. Over his 60-year career, he won 165 tournaments and is estimated to have travelled 15m miles – more than any other athlete. When he famously said: “The harder you work, the luckier you get”, he knew what he was talking about.

A neighbour asked me at the weekend how lambing was going. Typically, I said: “Ah grand now, apart from a bad start, we’ve been lucky so far.”

On reflection, a more accurate answer would have been: “Well, we did our homework, got the feeding plan mostly right, made a few mistakes and learned from them, put in the hours checking them, recorded their lambing details, took annual leave from the off-farm job, sorted out housing when it was lashing rain, and generally worked very hard over the past two weeks. Then yeah, we got lucky as well.”

Quite the self-righteous mouthful you’ll agree, and I’m sure the neighbour would be sorry he asked in the first place if I’d given that reply.

But it’s the truth. I often think that us farmers would be better thought of if we admitted to the effort we put into our various enterprises. Yes, we all need luck at times and there are some things we can do nothing about, such as the weather. However, luck will never pay the bills. Just ask Gary Player.

National reserve

We had some bad luck recently too when I attended an oral hearing on my appeal to the National Reserve and Young Farmer schemes. Prior to the hearing, my only correspondence from the Department of Agriculture were essentially one-line letters stating that I had a herd number in 2004. Hence, I was ineligible for both of the above schemes.

Fast-forward to the oral hearing and I was sucker-punched with other “evidence” that had never been mentioned up to that point

I could easily explain this and supplied large amounts of paperwork to support my reasoning over the past 18 months.

Fast-forward to the oral hearing though and I was sucker-punched with other “evidence” that had never been mentioned up to that point. There was no question that it deemed me ineligible, but since it was never presented to me I had been working off the assumption that the Department had already checked it and deemed it irrelevant. For this reason, I strongly pursued the appeal.

If I had been given the full story from the Department’s point-of-view in the original rejection letter, I’d have been saved 18 months of stress and uncertainty. Instead, their omission of particular details directly led me to believe that I had a strong chance of being successful.

As ever after disappointment, there are lessons to be learned. I’ve certainly extracted several from this debacle. It will be more hard work from here on and we’ll better position ourselves to take advantage of any luck that might fall our way.

Kieran Sullivan and his brother farm part-time in Co. Waterford. You can follow him on Twitter: @kieran_sullivan

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