Kildare farmer Melvyn Payne and his son Nigel keep 90 suckler cows and their own Simmental bull over a 250-acre split enterprise in Newbridge, Co Kildare.

“I wasn’t fond of school, I left it at 14 even though I should have stayed – maybe. That’s a while ago, I am 69 now. It was a different world that time. We had nothing only a horse and a fork. It is unbelievable how much things have changed. Machinery replaced men and subsidies came about. My father had an ordinary bit of a mixed farm at home in Rathangan. We only had four or five milking cows, a few store cattle, sows, hens, corn and vegetables – a whole lot of things really. Everything was home produced, we made our own butter and ate our own meat.

Suckler farmer Melvyn Payne. \ Philip Doyle

At that time people were kind of naïve – if you can still call it that – we weren’t aware that there was another world out there, away from farming. There were cousins of mine who went to university, but there weren’t too many interested in that in my circle. It was a farming area and that was it. I was happy enough. If you hadn’t a farm, you immigrated to England to work on the buildings. After that there was a bit of a craze in young lads buying farms. They had no money, but they bought these 100-acre farms for about £15,000. They all succeeded, because inflation came with the common market in 1974. Land and produce prices went up and inflation paid for the whole lot of it, if they were any way lucky. But they had to work very hard at it.

“When I left school we got a young mare and my father did all the work with her. She lived for 12 years. He had horses his whole life. He got someone to plough for him and he would till, drill, sow and do all the harvesting with the horse. I remember when I was 16 my mother said: ‘This fella won’t stay if we don’t do something different around here.’ So, we bought our first tractor: a little TVO Ferguson that we gave £112 for. My father and myself – like every father and son – didn’t get on too well, but we were very close at the end of the day.

\ Philip Doyle

Suckler farmer Melvyn Payne. \ Philip Doyle

“There was a big boom at one stage with selling hay to horse trainers. My father went up to the Curragh with hay for 20 odd years. If you had a deal like that, it would boost your income every year. He was a very progressive man. He wasn’t into machinery, but we had middling old land and he was very interested in reclamation and improving the land. I learned a lot of that from him and have always tried to improve land myself.

“If we had an animal that wasn’t eating well or had a hard time calving, we often gave her four or five pints of milk with a dozen eggs mixed in. She has to eat it when you put it down her neck. I think them kind of things worked well. Every farm had a touch of ring worm when I was a young lad. You would put burnt engine oil out of the car on to it, I don’t know if it did anything, but that’s the way things used to be. Now, we treat ringworm with a fungicide spray. They pick it up from rubbing off walls and fences. It looks bad and causes them some irritation, but doesn’t cause them any major harm.

Suckler farmer Melvyn Payne. \ Philip Doyle

“There are a lot of viruses out there now that are harmful though and when you see them they are not nice. Red water used to be a big problem, but that is nearly gone now with vaccines. Coccidiosis and scour are common now too because of our numbers and it is building up in the ground year on year. We are great believers in vaccines here – they do work and are not costly when you see the damage there could be. We used to keep sheep. One time they got toxoplasmosis, which causes abortion, and we had it for three years. On average there were 50 ewes that aborted every year and the lambs came out dead. We were lucky because that was the only thing we ever came up against. We vaccinate for nearly anything that is going now. There is always something to look after.”

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