We farm: “700ac in total, 12ac of that is under Christmas trees and the rest is under tillage.”

Family: “It’s a family farm. I farm with my father Isaac, my mother Mary, brother Andrew, sister Lisa and my brother-in-law Patrick.”

Christmas trees: “We started growing Christmas trees 20 years ago and started out on 2ac. We said we would try it, see where it would go and it went from there. There’s about 2,000 trees per acre. It’s a family experience to pick out the tree. You come to the farm, go to the field and pick a tree from one of the plots which are all named after family members. Then it’s cut down, brought to the yard, netted and put into the car.”

Species: “We have four different species of tree on the farm - Noble Fir, Nordmann Fir, Korean Fir and Fraser Fir.”

Harvest: “It takes eight years from the time of planting the sapling to harvesting it when the tree is between five and six foot tall. We sell the trees at €30 to customers on the farm. We’ll be cutting trees up to Christmas and every tree that is cut down we will replace next year. We plan to increase the acreage over the coming years.”

Tillage: “It wasn’t a great year on the tillage side of things, but prices were up which compensated for lower yields. We have spring barley, winter barley, winter wheat, winter oilseed rape and spring beans.” Expansion: “We want to expand the tillage farm but it’s getting tougher to rent or buy land with the demand from dairy farmers.”