The summer of 2014 will be a memorable and, hopefully, a life-changing experience for me, thanks to a bursary I was awarded from the North Kildare Lamb Producer Group. The group, which was formed in 1990, trades 10,000 to 12,000 lambs per year from its 50 members, supplying Irish Country Meats and Kildare Chilling.

The aim of the bursary is to allow young farmers interested in sheep production to broaden their skills and to gain further knowledge in areas that interest them. The group also asked me to spend some time working in a farm shop that specialises in marketing their produce direct to the consumer, and report on the potential for a similar business plan in an Irish setting.

The farm shop

As well as working in the farm shop, I knew I would be able to travel around Britain gaining experience and knowledge in the areas I was interested in. After some research and an initial trip to look at farm shops, I began to work in the 2014 British farm shop of the year, Blacker Hall Farm Shop.

Located in Wakefield, between the cities of Sheffield and Leeds in Yorkshire, Blacker Hall Farm Shop operates a mixed livestock and tillage enterprise across 1,200 acres (485ha) of land.

All livestock are sold through the farm shop with all grain and straw produced in the tillage enterprise used for feeding and bedding pigs and cattle.

One interesting point about the feeding of the pigs is that if the price of cereals is high, as it was in previous years, by-products such as bread, beer, distillers and flour are fed to the pigs using a “wet feed” system, which was installed when the fattening unit was increased to a 1,000-pig unit 10 years ago. This allows for maximum returns to be generated from cereals produced as they can be sold when profits are high but retained on the farm when cereal margins are low.

The shop employs 130 staff, which is remarkable since it was only started as a mother-and-son partnership in 1999, before expanding to employing a butcher and baker and making good progress ever since.

Services offered

The business now comprises a bakery supplying products such as bread, confectionary, ready meals and savoury dishes. All products are created from scratch and without the use of artificial preservatives. Their slogan is: “It’s the same as your mother’s baking, only we have more staff and use bigger equipment.”

There is also an on-site butcher, doing all meat preparation work from boning carcases to stuffing and marinating. Homemade sausages, burgers and savoury meals are also produced through the butcher. The butchers and bakers are given the task of supplying the on-site delicatessen, cold counter, café, restaurant and sandwich van.

The sandwich van is a bit like an ice-cream van but, instead of selling ice-cream to children in housing estates, it sells both hot and cold produce to workers in industrial estates.

The farm shop also offers an on-site gift shop, florist and wine cellar, as well as a postal service of gifts from the shop to all around the country. Working in the farm shop was a real eye opener and an experience I will never forget.

While it was not focused on sheepmeat, it showed me the potential there is to expand and grow a business through a solid business plan of adding value to products, seeking out niche consumer opportunities and making the best of a clever marketing strategy.

Travel experience

When I finished my time working in the shop, I set about visiting and viewing farms which I read about in papers and heard about from farmers.

The two areas I was most interested in were pedigree ram breeding, as my father Michael has bred pedigree Suffolk rams since the 1980s on our farm in Galbally, Ballyhogue, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and efficient lamb production. I feel all areas of sheep management can be improved upon in Ireland by incorporating best practice from abroad.

Thankfully, I feel I made the most of my time in Britain as I was able to visit several pedigree ram breeders, many of whom reared rams in different ways and were also breeding an array of sheep.

One man sold 550 shearling (hogget) rams a year, while another offered rams for sale from five breeds – Suffolk, Texel, Bluefaced Leicester, Charollais and Swaledale, as well as 300 mule ewe lambs each year.

The scale of ram breeding in these areas was immense, with farmers feeling confident about the future due to the high annual return rate of farmers to buy rams, on-farm, from breeders they knew and trusted.

British farmers seem to like to purchase stock directly from farms as they can ask questions about the ram’s history, which is important to them in best matching their replacement policy and producing lambs for the factory trade. Growth rates, lambing difficulty and other traits are often discussed prior to purchase, as is flock health.

I was also able to go and view a farm which ran a flock of Highlander ewes. These are a New Zealand breed developed to be functional, highly maternal, prolific and easier to feed due to a medium-sized body weight. The farmer in question was able to lamb 600 Highlander ewes outdoors in April, checking the ewes only twice a day and still weaning 1.5 to 1.6 lambs per ewe.

What made this all the more remarkable was that none of the ewes received any concentrate feeding either pre- or post-lambing and no lambs received creep or a finishing ration. Instead, cheaper alternatives, such as swedes or fodder beet, were sown for wintering ewes (grazing in situ), while rape and red clover was grown for finishing lambs. When grazing crops such as these, he split the field into paddocks which supplied a week’s worth of fodder for the group entering the field. This system allowed him to utilise the crop close to its full potential but also meant that daily movement of the fence was not required, reducing the labour requirement.

For the grazing of red clover leys, he split fields into paddocks which would sustain the lambs for four days at a time and it gave the paddocks a 12-day rest between grazings.

These red clover leys allowed for nitrogen to build up in the soil over three years of finishing lambs. The area can then be put into cereals with minimal N added in producing the first year’s cereal crop.

The use of rape, swedes and fodder beet also allowed him to build up pH levels, as well as P and K (programme to improve soil fertility) before putting the field into permanent pasture or cereals.

Cereal crops were used between grass reseeds to enable spraying out of any weeds and tidy the fields before the field entered another 10 years of grass.

The entire fodder beet crop was grown with no use of artificial fertilizer. Instead, a local turkey farm’s manure was spread on to the field prior to sowing. The same was done with almost all of the cereal crops grown on the farm.

Welsh experience

When travelling through Wales, I was able to meet a farmer who grew lucerne in an area with a higher rainfall level than that of my home county of Wexford. I was interested in this as I had heard lucerne could only be grown successfully in dry areas (lucerne is recommended as growing best in dry conditions, having difficulty where its roots are waterlogged).

The lucerne received no nitrogen and produced four heavy cuts of silage per year, which was used for feeding all ewes pre-lambing, with only triplets receiving 0.25kg of barley as further supplementation prior to lambing. The same farmer used 9ha of a red clover/perennial ryegrass mix to finish 450 lambs by dividing the field into nine paddocks and constantly moving the lambs throughout the summer post-weaning.

This field also produced two cuts of high protein silage, which is used to finish cattle with minimal concentrate feeding. A further 600 lambs were finished in the same manner by grazing a white clover, perennial ryegrass and chicory ley. These crops worked brilliantly but they are not without their problems.

Red clover cannot be grazed by ewes close to mating time due to infertility issues in ewes (contains oestrogens that affect ovulation) and if grazed for long periods at other times of the year can also lead to infertility.

Lucerne is dependant on free draining soils and does not do well in anything resembling wet soil. Problems exist with chicory as it requires a large number of grazing lambs regularly or it can quickly get out of control, becoming too advanced and unsuitable for grazing.

Young sheep farmer

Finally, I was able to visit Britain’s young farmer of the year winner, Marc Jones. The farm was extremely impressive.

Marc worked three days a week as a farm adviser and ran a 1,200-ewe flock, stocking at four ewes to the acre, using little or no concentrates at all and weaning 1.5 lambs per ewe. This was made truly remarkable by the fact that when I asked him if he takes holidays at lambing, he replied by saying only if he was really busy.

Marc put a lot of his success down to the fact that he used rams with a high star rating in his system and culled ewes that gave problems constantly.

Lamb thrive was put down to meticulous attention to detail with regards to both ewe and lamb grazing routines with a paddock grazing system in place.

Lambs were moved every two days between fields post-weaning and every four days prior to weaning. To keep grass quality high after weaning, the ewes followed the lambs and were used to graze leys down to the required level.

I learned many lessons on my trip, which I hope to use in my work and on our farm. I would like to thank the North Kildare Producer Group for running a competition such as this and both FBD and O’Donovan Engineering for providing the bursary funding to make this possible.