The Avalon Hotel in Castlecomer will host an agricultural event with a difference on Thursday 5 June, when the first homeopathy conference run by farmers and for farmers takes place at the north Kilkenny venue.

Entitled ‘Beyond Chemicals: Homeopathy for Natural Disease Prevention in Livestock and Crops’, the conference brings together a wide range of agri-homeopathic experts from Ireland and around the world for an in-depth day of presentations and discussions.

The conference is open to organic farmers, regenerative farmers and conventional livestock and tillage farmers with an interest in these areas.

It is being jointly organised by the National Organic Training Skillnet (NOTS) and Whole Health Agriculture to bring a first-of-its-kind agricultural homeopathy conference to Ireland.

Among the main drivers of the Kilkenny conference is Cork-based dairy farmer Pat Aherne.

Aherne milks 90 cows on outskirts of Cork city at Lehenaghmore, Togher, close to Cork Airport.

Unconventional approach

Pat started to explore a more unconventional approach to farming when he had a major outbreak of mastitis about 15 years ago, with 16 cases being treated at one time.

“I remember coming into the parlour one morning and feeling like I was going into a war against nature and that I wasn’t winning the battle,” he recalls.

Aherne managed to battle through the mastitis surge, but swore that he would never subject his cows to the same level of antibiotic treatment again and began looking for alternatives.

From 2010 onwards, Aherne began trialling homeopathic remedies and he was excited by the results.

A week-long residential course in England with Whole Health Agriculture in 2017 gave Aherne a better grounding on homeopathy.

He now dries off 90% of the herd without using dry-cow tubes, uses remedies to deal with post-calving mastitis and fertility. Aherne is consistently achieving year on year a calving of over 80% in six weeks with an annual empty rate below 9%.

Other on-farm issues he is able to manage are calf scours, pneumonia, injuries and lameness.

Herd health

The Cork farmer is not claiming that homeopathy is cure-all, but he maintains that it can significantly improve herd health and cut veterinary bills if used correctly with conventional veterinary medicine.

Other farmers from Ireland, Britain and New Zealand will share their experiences of homeopathy at the conference, such as Laois dairy farmer Paul O’Brien and Tracey Simpson from New Zealand.

Among the vets in attendance will be Chris Aukland, who heads up the livestock health training programmes for Whole Health Agriculture.

However, not every vet has been won over to homeopathy.

Chair of Veterinary Ireland medicine’s committee Conor Geraghty said that conventional vets treat animals based on “peer-reviewed science and evidence-based data”.

“In the main, we follow conventional evidence. A small number of vets may use homeopathy in parallel to conventional therapy, but it wouldn’t be widely adopted,” he said.