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For many people, Kildare is a go through county as opposed to a go to county. Its proximity to Dublin makes it a conduit for the countless roads leading in and out of the capital. Driving on the by-roads offers motorists a different perspective, and is a welcome change from the monotony of the motorway.
The land looks good – large, level fields, well managed and fertile. A series of old disused mills dominate the landscape approaching every town and village. These mills serve as a reminder of Kildare’s past – a provider of grain to Dublin and beyond.
Farming practices change slowly. Today, there are only 153 dairy farmers in Kildare and most of these are liquid milk suppliers, serving the capital with fresh milk daily. Very few of the dairy farmers in Kildare are spring-calving and even fewer are what could be considered low-input dairy farmers.
Brian Rushe is bucking the trend. Up until three years ago, Brian and his father, John, were running a large beef and tillage farm. Extending to 168ha in three blocks, there was tillage, sucklers and a large beef finishing enterprise.
By buying and ‘punching’ hundreds of cattle during the reference period, the Rushes managed to build up a substantial Single Farm Payment (SFP), with high entitlements per hectare.
“Over the last 10 years, while farming in the drystock and tillage sectors, a successful year would be to retain the SFP, which we have been doing. However, take away the SFP and the farm wasn’t returning a profit.
“I love farming, I love being around and managing stock. The proposal to flatten out the SFP was going take money directly out of our pockets, so I realised that if I was to remain as full-time farmer something would have to change,” said Brian.
In 2011, Brian bought 40 dairy heifer calves and in 2015 he milked 124 cows.
Farming or the family business?
The Rushes are business people. Brian’s father, John, is in partnership with Brian on the farm and also owns and runs a chain of supermarkets in south Dublin. Brian’s younger brother, Shane, is the operations manager for that business.
Brian was always more interested in farming than retailing. After school, he started a course at Dublin Business School, but decided after two years to go and do the Green Cert in Kildalton, before returning home to run the family farm.
I asked Brian, why did he buy the dairy calves? Surely he could have gotten involved in the other family business to supplement income and continue to farm on a part-time basis.
“Buying the calves was low-risk investment, if I didn’t get into dairying they could always be sold, but I suppose it was a statement of intent alright. I wanted to be a full-time farmer and I wanted to grow the farming business. I suppose dairying was the only enterprise that could enable me to do that.”
Developing the farm
The Rushe farm is laid out in three blocks – 48ha surrounding the house and farmyard at Derrinturn, 50ha located four miles away and, the largest block, 70ha in tillage, just six miles away from the main yard.
In 2012, Brian applied for new entrant milk quota and was successful. Because the home farm had the heavier soil of the three farms and was the smallest land block, this was not going to be the milking platform. Brian chose to convert the 50ha out-farm located four miles away into the dairy farm.
“This block of land was free-draining and all in grass, with a central roadway already in place. While the 70ha tillage farm is probably better land, converting this into a milking platform was going to take considerably more capital to get it fully operational,” says Brian.
The latter half of 2012 was spent building and developing.
“In hindsight, I probably spent a bit too much time working and not enough time talking and listening to existing dairy farmers.”
But by doing a lot of the work themselves, Brian and his family saved a considerable amount of money on the conversion from beef to dairy.
Long-term plan
Brian identified what was needed to milk cows on the farm and then went from there.
His long-term plan was to stock the farm at 3.5 cows/ha and use the land at home for silage and heifer-rearing. But because of quota the farm would only be stocked lightly during 2013 and 2014, with 60 and 80 cows being milked in each respective year.
“This meant that some of the jobs could be delayed, 65 acres were reseeded in 2013, 18 acres were reseeded in 2014 and 15 acres will be reseeded this year. The existing farm roadway was sufficient for the first year, but it was doubled in length last year.”
What couldn’t be delayed was the milking parlour. As the chosen land block was a green field with no existing buildings, Brian’s preference was to site the parlour in the middle of the farm. However, issues surrounding planning permission meant that the milking parlour had to be built closer to the road.
A 20-unit milking parlour, dairy, collecting yard, farm office, storage shed and slatted tank with a feed face for up to 80 cows were built in late 2012. The parlour is basic, no cluster removers, no milk recorders.
“Very little to go wrong,” says Brian.
Learning curve
Interestingly, Brian never milked a cow before he milked in this parlour.
“I actually hadn’t time. I was heavily involved in the construction work – doing as much of the donkey work as I could to keep costs down and also continuing to run the beef enterprise.
“I was also probably a bit shy about it. I know a lot of people at the time thought I was mad to be getting into dairy farming and I found it difficult to muster up the courage to go and seek out advice from other dairy farmers. I was kind of expecting the same reaction, so it was easier for me to stay at home and work.”
After the first cow calved, Brian’s work rate and learning curve increased rapidly. Cows are housed for the winter on the home farm, utilising the existing sheds. After calving, they are brought down to the milking block to join the main herd.
“I totally underestimated the workload in the first spring. I was on my own, except for relief milkers, and I was working day and night. The farm was not fully set up before the cows started calving – the water system wasn’t fully installed, fencing wasn’t completed and there were other teething problems – like with any new enterprise, but being on my own definitely made it harder.”
No regrets
I asked Brian if there ever were days when he was totally fed up and questioned why he ever got into cows.
“Definitely not, I could see light at the end of the tunnel. I could see my preferred system taking shape. Yes, there are things I would’ve done differently, but I never regretted the decision, not then and not now.”
The first thing Brian would do differently is to sell all the sucklers earlier. His plan was to hang on to as much of them as possible and sell them as he purchased more dairy cows, but this added to his workload. Brian had 40 of his own heifers that he bought as calves and planned on buying 25 calved heifers in 2013.
Rather than telling me I was mad, the people I met asked me why I wasn’t in dairy farming before now
While replying to an advert with heifers for sale, little did he know that he would be building a friendship with the vendor that would have a lasting impact on his future direction.
In the end, he didn’t buy those heifers, but leased them instead. Twenty leased heifers arrived in his yard a week later, the plan was to lease the calved heifers until the end of 2014. The crossbred animals looked out of place alongside the Friesian heifers that Brian bought back in 2011.
“The Jersey crossbred cows opened my eyes to the benefits of crossbreeding and the relationship I have built up with the owner has changed the way I farm and my outlook on life. I met a really good farmer and he then introduced me to other good farmers. This opened me up to networking, the power of sharing information, knowledge and positive thinking. Rather than telling me I was mad, the people I met asked me why I wasn’t in dairy farming before now.
“Since this encounter, I’ve joined two discussion groups and I applied for and was successful in getting a Nuffield scholarship, so I’m off around the world in June and July – something I never thought possible.”
Future plans
Brian is very clear about his future plans. His ideal system is to stock the milking platform at 3.5 cows/ha and use the home block as a support, producing all silage and rearing the young stock. The 70ha tillage farm is currently being share-farmed with neighbouring tillage farmers, freeing up more time for Brian to concentrate on the cows.
Stocking the farm at 3.5 cows/ha means milking 175 cows. At present, Brian is milking 124. The leased cows have been returned and Brian now owns all the stock. He has 34 maiden heifers going to the bull and 60 dairy heifer calves. All going well, he says he should be up to his desired stocking rate by 2017.
In 2014, the farm grew on average 12.1t/ha of grass, but this includes parts of the farm that were not reseeded and were used mostly for silage. The reseeded sections, where the cows spent most of their time, grew 15t/ha. Brian feels the potential of the farm is in excess of 16t/ha every year. He says that soil fertility is relatively poor, a map in the farm office, colour-coded for phosphorus and potassium status, shows the majority of fields at index 1 and index 2, so he is targeting the worst of these with up to four bags of 10:10:20 each year.
To stock the farm at 3.5 cows/ha, Brian must grow 16.8t/ha if he is not to feed more than 500kg of supplement per cow. This is based on an average cow eating 4.5t of feed during lactation only, excluding silage fed over the winter (presuming this is being supplied by the other land blocks). This also presumes an 80% utilisation rate.
Profit is important, but cash is sacred
Brian’s enthusiasm for dairying is contagious. He soaks up information like a sponge and when you squeeze him, he gives it all back and more.
He has a set of rules written up on the wall of the farm office, which he says he must adhere to. Rule number one is feed the wedge, not the cow. This is Brian’s philosophy surrounding meal feeding – it should only be fed if grass is scarce and he says he won’t feed meal to drive more milk out of cows, irrespective of meal and milk price.
His second rule is that cash is king. When doing financial budgets for the farm, generating a cash surplus is the most important thing for Brian.
“Profit is important, but cash is sacred.”
Before the conversion to dairying, he spent hours doing cashflow projections based on differing milk prices and capital spends. Pen and paper is his preferred method of doing these, but he also uses the computer. He says that when he started milking the extra workload on him meant that the paperwork suffered.
“Coming in from a day’s work to face a couple of hours of paperwork was just not on, invariably it was left undone. Now I dedicate one morning per week to the office. I think morning is best because I’m fresh and my mind is more active.”
On the grass front
Grassland management is the next rule on Brian’s list. The farm must be walked weekly and a grass budget completed. This feeds into his next rule about attending discussion group meetings and interacting with like-minded, positive people.
“I remember the day I attended my first discussion group meeting. The information that the other farmers were rattling off was just mind-boggling – grass growth, average farm cover, milk solids produced and so on. I hadn’t a clue about most of these, but knew that I had to upskill to keep up with the pace.”
Brian credits his Teagasc advisers Fintan Monahan and Ned Loughlin as being a big help, but also the other farmers in the Acorn and North Kildare discussion groups.
“After a while I wasn’t afraid of looking stupid and started asking more questions. I still have lots to learn, but I’m more confident about what I’m doing and where I’m going,” he says.
On the grass front, Brian targets a closing cover of 600kg/ha and expects opening cover to be between 650kg and 700kg/ha. As stocking rate increases, these covers may also need to rise. One issue for Brian is that there are no housing facilities on the farm. So what happens when it’s pouring rain for a week in March?
“It’s an issue, but a manageable one. The first thing we do when it’s wet is to target the driest paddocks. If cows need to come off for a few hours we’ll stand them on the slats near the collecting yard, but I don’t like doing this for any more than three hours at a time. Last year, we had one paddock that we didn’t get to graze in the back end so we carried over a heavy cover. This was one of the paddocks that we intended for reseeding so we weren’t too worried about doing damage on it. They would have went there on the wettest nights this spring.”
Risk and consquence
As stocking rate increases, Brian’s ability to play around with some sacrifice area will decrease. The risk of and the consequences of poaching are greater at higher stocking rates. However, it’s worth remembering that this is a dry farm and rainfall levels in the region are relatively low, between 800mm and 1,000mm/year on average, so Brian can cope better than most with adverse conditions.
That said, building housing on the farm is something that Brian is considering.
In terms of development work, net of grant for the milking parlour and bulk tank, Brian says total capital expenditure was €250,000 excluding stock. For this, Brian got everything in the yard, a new 20-unit Dairymaster milking parlour, 15,000-litre Dairymaster bulk tank, 200,000-litre slurry storage, a collecting yard, crush and handling facilities. Then 400m of a farm roadway were built, the farm was re-fenced into 28 2ha paddocks and a new loop water system was installed by Terra Services.
This dairy farm was designed and built with 175 cows in mind. If we take a cost of €1,300 to get a cow on the ground, and add this to the capital expenditure in buildings and equipment, the total cost per cow comes to €2,782. This seems very reasonable, but remember, no housing was built and a lot of the development work was done by Brian with help from family and relief labour.
Most of the fencing was done in-house and any stone needed for the building was sourced from a gravel quarry on the farm.
Brian reckons that he saved about €50,000 when all this is factored in, excluding his own time.
Future growth
When talk turns to the future, Brian mentions his own father and talks of the opportunities he has provided for his family. Having two young boys of his own, Brian hopes to provide similar opportunities for them, whether that’s in dairying or not is up to them, he says.
A bit like the road to Dublin, he believes dairying can provide himself and his family with a pathway to future growth.
This article was first published in Irish Dairy Farmer magazine in July 2015. Don't miss the next issue of the magazine out this coming November.
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