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I farm: “Roughly 90ac in one block. We’re sitting on good limestone soil, our biggest problem is that it can get very dry in the summer.”
Family: “My daughter Jill is in her third year doing agriculture in WIT and my husband Eddie works full-time in a piggery.”
Cows: “We have 50 suckler cows. They’re mainly Limousin, Charolais and Simmental crosses. We calve about 22 in autumn and the rest are spring-calving. We have a Charolais stock bull but we’d use easy-calving Limousin AI on some maiden heifers.”
Sheep: “There are about 50 commercial ewes and 20 pedigree Texels. We got into Texels about two years ago and my husband loves them. The Texels will start lambing the end of January and the commercial ewes from St Patrick’s Day.”
Breeding: “We had a disastrous year with embryos in sheep. We’ve been doing it for years and it worked well but after this year I’ve sworn off it. It was too disappointing.”
Selling: ”We sell weanlings at about nine months in Ennis Mart. All the cows come from Clare and all the weanlings are sold there. We find there’s a good trade for weanlings. I sell lambs to the butcher and the mart, and sell pedigree rams at pedigree sales.”
Part-time job: “With our type of farming it’s important to have another source of income, I started working for a company called Agritxt about 14 months ago. They do the paperwork for farmers for their Bord Bia audits. I love working there – it gets me out and gives me contact with people.
BEEP: “It’s been a good year in general. Since we joined BEEP we’ve weighed stock and it has made us more aware of the weight gain performance.”
This week: “We’ll be vaccinating the cows for lepto and IBR and the spring-calving cows will get a mineral bolus.”
Quotable quote: “This year, we got a handling crate with a weighing scales and all the bells and whistles. It’s made life so much easier for handling the stock. If there was more money in beef at the moment I’d recommend anyone get one.”
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