A quantity surveyor by training, in 2012 Limerick man Niall Moloney put measuring building materials to one side and instead started measuring grass, after he returned home to farm alongside his father Jerry on the family farm at Crecora, outside Limerick city.
The move has been a major success and the pair are now milking 176 cows on a 53ha milking platform of good land. There are three things Niall is passionate about when it comes to farming; grass, breeding and making things labour efficient. Throughout the tour of the farm with the judges, he spoke about his desire to make farming as similar as possible to a Monday to Friday job.
With his wife Ann, they have two young children Hazel and Eva and are GAA fans so with Limerick doing well this year, there was a lot of time off required. Michelle O’Keeffe is the full-time employee on the farm along with two part-timers Padraig Byrnes and John Quinn. Niall’s father Jerry still helps out also.
Performance is very good on this farm, with over 15.5t DM/ha of grass grown last year and Niall is a very regular grass measurer. Milk solids production is also good, with the herd delivering 524kg MS/cow last year from just over 1t of meal per cow.
With the milking platform stocked at 3.2 cows/ha, there are occasions where the herd needs to be supplemented with additional feeds. The outside blocks are used for heifers and silage. Surplus grass from these blocks is occasionally zero grazed back to the home farm to take the pressure off.
The EBI of the herd is €180, which would be in the top 2% of herds nationally. No crossbreeding has been used on the farm. Niall says he has always been into breeding, even as a child saying, “when other children were reading Harry Potter books, I was reading AI catalogues.”
This year’s crop of calves have an EBI of €202, with a milk sub-index of €57 and a fertility sub-index of €90. The cows also have a high health figure, with the herd at €10. Only AI has been used for breeding replacements since 1990, with both Jerry and Niall trained in DIY AI. He uses all AI for the first seven weeks and then the stock bull is released. Typically, empty rates are around 8% to 9% and the six-week calving rate is 89%.
Niall is heavily involved in the Evolve programme, claiming payments last year in areas such as protected urea, milk recording, herd genetics and protecting waterways. Always keen to learn and upskill, he’s a member of three discussion groups, the Adare discussion group, the Kerry Demonstration Group and the Climate Action Group.
Farm facilities are good, with a new calf shed built three years ago which has an automated calf feeder in place. Earlier this year, Niall installed a new reedbed system on the lower part of the farmyard to catch any grey water before it makes its way to the watercourses.
