On this farm we have been using the same veterinary practice for nearly 30 years. They are quite a big practice as their area has a lot of large dairy herds and some large feedlots along with lots of sucklers and sheep.

Sometimes I think vets are a little underrated. Who else would call to your farm 24/7, and normally within one hour of your call, to attend for a routine procedure or a critical ill animal? You will be hard pressed to get a doctor to come to your home if you are ill as promptly. Think about it.

Information night

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The practice hold information nights every year for the different farmers in their practice and serve a sit down dinner as well, this gets plenty to attend. Before Christmas we got the call to go the beef night in a local GAA clubhouse, on a separate note this gives the GAA club an extra source of income too, which shows how important the farming community is to the rural economy.

The meeting focused on pneumonia and housing related illnesses, a relevant topic for the time of the year. We had some great speakers to listen to, all offering great information. The key message was “ventilation, ventilation, ventilation” for all livestock. We were told that most farm animals were designed for the outdoors and did not need to be kept in a centrally heated shed with no light and air. There was a subsequent slideshow of good sheds and badly designed sheds which led to a lot of debate.

The practice held a fantastic meeting on sheep lameness last autumn. They are invaluable nights I find and not just for the veterinary guidance but also from a social point of view to get farmers out talking and meeting new people.

Future

At the end of the beef meeting, the chairman opened the floor to questions and he threw out the first one “where did the beef farmer see themselves in three to five years?” Well, I could write a book on the responses. Some were quite heated, but relevant nonetheless.

The next topic was the role of the part-time farmer, as a lot of the suckler/sheep farmers would have another income coming into the home. When the question was asked initially I didn’t think it would spark such a lively debate but it did, some of the “full-time” farmers thought the “part-time” man had extra purchasing power and this was unfair at sales, intense exchanges followed but a calming voice reassured everyone that on some level farming was being subsidised by a lot of sectors and he didn’t mean the Single Farm Payment (SFP).

Rural economy

He added how many civil servants/tradesmen etc didn’t have enough land to be viable but yet, through their love for farming, they were keeping the farm going at weekends/evenings and how much money in real terms was this adding to the rural economy and the fact that if it took a job to keep them in the country they in turn were keeping somebody employed in the local feed supplies/hardware, an extra teacher in the local school. Food for thought, we all need each other to survive and spend a few euros.

I wrote this while I was waiting for one of the vets to arrive to attend a heifer who got bullied on the slats and hurt. So how long was I writing?

Ronan Delany runs a sheep and beef enterprise with a small herd of pedigree Belted Galloway cattle at Dunshaughlin, Meath. You can follow him on Twitter @gaulstownfarms.