If you were to ask a medium- to large-sized dairy, drystock or tillage farmer what are some key things we are short of in agriculture, you’d probably get a variety of answers: from land availability to more young people coming in to the sector and everything in between.

At Dairy Day on Saturday last, Rachel Donovan, our news correspondent, interviewed a retired dairy farmer who hadn’t gone away with his wife for the first 16 years of their marriage.

Dairy farming was a vocation back then, with little relief available; relief milkers at the weekends weren’t a thing and more people than not milked right through the winter for cash flow. We’re moving away from this, and rightly so. Everyone needs time away from the yard to avoid burn-out, no matter what your chosen enterprise is, but how do we do this when we still have a scarcity of skilled labour available to us?

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Technology the key

Technology on farms may be the key to unlocking more time away from farming, improving lifestyle and hopefully making agriculture a more tempting role for younger people to enter in to. When we can’t get more feet on the ground, we need to get more efficient with our time.

In this week's Focus, Daire Cregg and I look at where dairy farmers can invest on farm to reduce labour, particularly around calf rearing, milking and heat detection, probably the three most time-consuming tasks on a dairy farm.

Tommy Moyles and I report from one of the talks at Dairy Day with builder/dairy farmer John Mulcahy and Bertie Troy of Grasstec, who discussed some of the various options and costs associated with slurry storage.

I detail how TAMS costings for sheep fencing are more in line now with updated reference costs, while on p48 Adam Woods runs through the benefits of ride-on cubicle bedders.