Over 200 people flocked to the biological farming conference in Tullamore’s Bridge House Hotel on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

A number of farmers spoke candidly about their experiences of conventional farming, and their "road of Damascus" moment where they began to question accepted methods of farming.

I started noticing unusual animal illnesses

“I had quite a high intensive beef finishing system, finishing some animals off a feedlot style system,” Limerick farmer Michael Costello told the crowd.

Costello said he now has a stocking rate of 2.8LU/ha and still aims to maximise output but without "fighting nature".

Cattle illnesses

“I started noticing a number of animal illnesses linked to more unusual causes a few years ago and overall I just felt I wasn’t getting a good enough return for the amount of labour that I was putting into the farm.”

Costello said he realised that he needed to change his farming practices and started with building up soil diversity by including deep rooting plants and moving away from perennial ryegrass.

Spreading of these volumes of slurry out of sheer panic is wrong

With a bank manager to answer to, he emphasised how he still needed to maximise output from the farm and worked to a simple mantra of “trying to grow as much as possible with as little as possible.”

Fertiliser

He reduced fertiliser input from 200 units of nitrogen per acre to 60 units with no major difference to growth, and readjusted his dosing approach to a needs-only basis.

There was also audible admiration from the crowd, when Costello showed a presentation slide of a picture of a luscious green sward with a pea and grass mix, taken during the height of the summer drought.

“I’d say it was the only green field in the parish,” Costello said, also showing pictures from his farm of more conventional grassland which had been clearly burnt by drought conditions.

Soil

The emphasis on correcting and working with soil was reiterated across the conference.

While many farmers will have heard about the importance of spreading lime, the conference heard about the need to address cobalt and nickel in soil health as well.

The use of slurry and farmyard manure (FYM) was promoted as a valuable resource, but many of the speakers questioned the current calendar farming system.

“I think spreading of these volumes of slurry out of sheer panic is wrong,” David Wallice said.

“It’s mistreating an extremely valuable resource. The longer I work the more I think that a little and often approach is the best model.”

Many of the speakers concurred and pointed out that FYM improved the longer it had to rot down but that deadlines meant that they had to stick to a style of calendar farming that wasn’t always necessarily the best thing for the soil.