You can practically hear the hum of Cork city from the lands at White’s Cross but Sean Hegarty isn’t worried about traffic lights or beeping horns.

As long as he can maintain a steady flow of monthly milk to Clona Dairies he’s happy enough.

A liquid milk producer with an output of at least 50,000 litres of milk for every month is a serious business by any standards.

Match that with quality SCC and TBC results and you know you have business intent on staying around.

Sean is focused on maximising output and one of the big drivers must be the investment he has made in facilities. Starting from a blank canvas, Sean purchased land and built wintering and milking facilities.

He effectively has 40ha available for cows with another 30ha rented for silage and rearing replacements away from the farm.

Given he is producing a lot of milk during the winter, he needs quality silage so he aims for three light cuts of silage on some of his land.

Quality silage and good grazing means he can aim to keep his meal supplement around 1.2t/cow. How is he getting such good SCC results during the winter?

“In winter, we strip morning and evening and we use a refined sawdust on the cubicle beds, which is expensive, but it soaks any moisture.

"That, coupled with milk recording every six weeks, keeps us on track when the pressure is on,’’ he said.

Will you stay with winter milk?

“We are paid on volume but more and more of the breeding emphasis for us is on fat and protein. In the long term I’m not sure the additional winter bonus is enough to keep us in winter milk given the higher costs.

"We’ll go a bit more spring – our ratio of supply is about 65 spring-35 winter at the moment,” Sean said.

The 16-unit parlour is hot-washed once a day, and 1.4 litres of Deosan Diamond is the detergent. Serpent is used in the final rinse after milking and descale is used twice a week.

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