"The farm is doing everything technically right – excellent grassland management, high stocking rate, hitting breeding targets, great weaning weights and calves weaned per cow per year. It's producing an extremely saleable and marketable carcase – where is the problem?"

This was one of the questions asked at the third stand as part of the farm walk and it just so happened that this was the question on the tips of everybody’s tongues and to be truthful it didn’t really get answered.

Just over two years ago, at its first open day, there was an air of optimism about a new suckler demo herd for the west of Ireland that would demonstrate how to make money from a very simple system.

People were enthused by the project, eager to learn how it was going to be done and eager to follow the progress. At yesterday's farm walk there was almost an air of disappointment, not with the farm or how it was being managed, but disappointment with an industry that just isn't able to deliver a viable margin to its farmers.

The cow type probably generated the most conversation that day but it was the finances that generated the most questions yesterday.

The farm after three years trading has made a loss in 2015 and 2016 while returning a net profit of €4928 without accounting for the farm manager's salary, a land rent charge or capital repayments.

If these charges were included, the farm would be losing closer to €70,000 annually. The farm is projected to make a loss of between €10,000 and€15,000 for 2018 due to lower output and extra feed costs. At current performance, the farm would need in the region of €5.00/kg

Excellent technical performance

The farm couldn’t be going better in terms of technical performance and this credit to farm manager Matthew Murphy who has put in a huge amount of work in the Newford herd to get it to where it is today.

The farm has increased its soil P and K indexes and in turn has increased its growth rate and is close on hitting the target of 16 tonne of dry matter per hectare grass growth.

Grazing quality has been excellent with 39 grass walks completed in 2017. The farm has turned around a fodder deficit in the past three weeks taking out surplus bales and is now in an excellent position with an average farm cover of 920kg/DM/ha for the first week of September.

The breeding performance is even better with a 362 day calving interval after 10 weeks of AI, 1.08 calves per cow per year and excellent weaning weights.

The management team deserve credit for being up front with the figures, even if it isn’t that palatable. The financial situation on Newford is no different from many suckler to beef farms around the country and we will follow with interest whether the farm can turn its finances around and what route that will take.