Owen Ashton from Navan, Co Meath, was crowned this year’s FBD Young Farmer of the Year on Friday 17 December.

The Navan man doesn’t come from a farming background, but has had a keen interest in farming from the age of 14 or 15 when he started helping out on his uncle’s farm.

His uncle lives in north Wales and has a sheep and dairy farm.

Owen went on to study agriculture in Aberystwyth University in Wales and graduated with a first-class honours degree in 2013.

Experience

“I applied to UCD, but I really liked Aberystwyth. My father is from there as well and I knew the place.

“They offered a whole year out at the time and I had limited experience and needed a year on a farm," he said.

Owen went to New Zealand for seven months, where he calved 550 cows on the North Island and then went down to the South Island to calve another 720 cows.

I contacted a dairy farmer in north Wales, who was milking 1,200 cows

Calving in the South Island doesn’t begin until a month after the North Island, Ashton explained.

“I thought I’d stay in New Zealand just to milk and spray weeds, but then I contacted a dairy farmer in north Wales, who was milking 1,200 cows, so I flew over to Wales and calved 1,200 cows in January and I went back to finish my last year in university then in September,” he said.

Ashton is now farm manager in Castlelyons, Co Cork, where he is milking 180 cows, 150 of which are his own from accumulating numbers over the years.

First in-calf heifers

“In 2015, I bought my first 35 in-calf heifers and now this year I have 170 to calve. I have another 20 leased out to a very good farmer in Co Tipperary.

“I have no land or anything, so I kind of have to be a bit different I suppose,” he said.

The cows on the farm are a mixture of around 70% Friesian and 30% Friesian-Jersey-cross.

Farm safety

For the competition, there was an element on farm safety and prevention of farm accidents.

“Half of the accidents related to farming is got to do with machinery and we contract out all our machinery. So we don’t have to anything with machinery ourselves."

Main risk

Ashton explained how the main risk on their farm is with livestock.

“We try to always have two of us dealing with cows and have gates set up so we don’t have to go into a pen with a calving cow or bull.

“We try and minimise bulls on the farm, we only really have them for the four-week period when we are breeding. We also only use young bulls as they are more docile,” he said.

Breeding goes on for 11 weeks on the farm.

"We have three weeks of dairy AI, four weeks of beef AI and about four weeks of stock bulls who are generally Friesians.

"We use sexed Jersey straws on the heifers and synchronise them and we find that we get a fairly good conception rate that way," he said.