The shed is on the farm of Newmarket dairy farmer Pat O’Keeffe. It was put up in 2008 under the then grant scheme. Pat’s herd is spring calving and he can have up to 80 calves in this shed at peak. He designed this shed himself and then got in Donnie J Murphy & Sons to put it up and do concreting.

Picture one

The shed is four bays long, spans 12.8m (42 ft) and is 4.2m (14ft) high at the eaves. At the front are three sliding doors.

Picture two

The shed has a 2.4m (8ft ) centre passage and bedded pens on each side. The centre passage provides access to the pens and hay/straw are also fed here. Ordinary 4.6m (15ft) field gates are used to divide off the pens, both from each other and from the passage. The advantage, said Pat, is they were low cost while being strong enough for calves. Field gates cost €115 each, while barriers for calves would cost up to €200. “The only disadvantage is that they are high, too high to lean over comfortably. So another farmer might decide to go for a lower gate.’’

Pat deliberately opted for a back-to-back lean-to design with internal pillars rather than clear span – this was the easiest way to hang dividing gates.

Picture three

Pat specified that the centre passage be relatively narrow at 8ft. At the end of each pen he fitted the additional pair of 4ft half-gates we see here, one each side. These serve him two purposes.

Picture four

Chained back each gate forms a handy rack for hay or straw.

Picture five

To clean out dirty bedding, Pat – helped here by his son Daniel – closes the gates right along the passage. Pat and Daniel open the front gates of the pens and let the calves out into the centre passage. Each pen of calves is locked into their own temporary pen on the passage.

Picture six

The O’Keeffes then swing back the gates that divide the pens, leaving the bedded side of the shed now open for cleaning out.

Pat uses his JCB wheeled digger for this job, driving in through the sliding door. He kept the roof of this shed slightly high at 14ft so that the JCB’s back actor would fit in – he has about 1ft of headroom.

Pat pushes the dirty straw down to the end wall. To allow this he made the end wall of mass concrete with reinforcing.

He then pulls the bedding back with the split bucket on front of the JCB.

“It’s better than a grab,’’ he told me. He then rolls in a bale of fresh straw, lets the calves back in and repeats the process for the other side of the shed.

Picture seven

Pat modified the gates to allow them open and close around the drinkers.

Each drinker serves two pens and they are the small type so as not to be at risk of damage by the digger during cleaning out.

Picture eight

Daniel and Pat O’Keeffe said: “Rather than letting dirty bedding build up, I clean out every week. I can clean out and bed 80 calves in an hour and a half and it’s a one-man operation. I’m thankful we did the shed this way.’’ Run-off from the shed flows into a flow channel and on to a slurry store.