Innovation comes easy to those who want it. Ger Doyle and family farm near Mullinavat in south Kilkenny.

Land around Ger is not the flat plains of Kilkenny and good soils. Instead, it’s a more challenging area with hills and elevated fields that grow good grass, but are slightly more difficult to manage. Ger was lucky to be able to work with two local landowners to swap land parcels away from the farmyard for land closer to the yard to grow his milking platform.

He had a significant problem with mastitis over 20 years ago.

At the time, Ger was milking in an eight-unit parlour and he had every expert under the sun in the yard trying to find the source of his somatic cell count problem.

Almost 48 out of the 54 milking cows had some touch of mastitis and Ger was frustrated and close to walking away from cows.

Eventually, the problem was tracked down to faulty air bleeds on the claw pieces and the fact the air inlet hole was too small with some getting clogged up.

It just goes to show – the best operators have problems too but good farmers act on lessons learned to make the best of a bad situation.

Today, Ger is milking 136 cows on a 57ha grazing block with over 70ha farmed.

The stocking rate is 2.4 cows/ha. Locally, horses and cows make for hot competition for land and Ger has had to buy a few parcels on his development journey.

Milk quality is as good as it gets on this commercial farm and the lessons of best practice have been picked up. Ger had a great understanding of the whole process from cow to tank.

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