Last month we witnessed an historic ‘breaking of boundaries’ as the marriage equality referendum was passed. Scores of people danced on the streets of Dublin – evidence of the momentousness of the occasion.

Today, boundaries were broken on our farm and though I wasn’t pirouetting off the tractor with joy, a content smile was cracked when all was done. The changes will make life a lot easier in the near future.

Everyone has a ‘long field’ and everyone has a ‘pen field’. Ours are parallel to each other, but no pass-way exists between the two. Bringing a bulling cow in from the long field used to be a tedious ordeal: not anymore.

After a morning of sweaty ignorance, I swapped my lumberjack hat for an engineer’s one – a simple, yet clever bit of fencing with some bungee-wire completed the job. It may not sound much, but to us it’s significant. What had delayed the job until now was the width of the potential gap; just 8ft.

Whole trees would’ve needed to come out for anything wider. But, just as the job was completed, a mounting cow caught my eye – the first test. Instead of separating her out with her calf, we drove the whole group, 54 animals, toward the 8ft gap. Heart-in-mouth stuff. They went through with quiet ease; like a sweetener into the FAI’s bank account.

Maternal Limousin, OZS, was on the menu for the said cow. This week we dabbled in some Saler, using three RIO straws. He’s got an exceptional Eurostar value on the replacement index. My dad, currently out of the country, may get a shock when he looks at the service records. It’s the first time I can remember us deviating from CH, LM, BB or SM bulls. RIO’s high reliability is what’s attractive.

There are three bulls above him on the index, but all have much inferior reliability figures. I’ve put him on beefy, terminal cows with a view to producing a few well-balanced, robust heifers. It’ll be a case of ‘I told you so’ if the well-documented Saler temperament shines through next year. A pal shared a story about a Saler bull exiting a cubicle shed via a skylight recently, which hasn’t filled me with confidence.

New gaps and Saler straws; the times they are a changin’...

Hopefully, any boundaries broken by RIO’s ‘excitable’ calves next year will be purely theoretical.