Hundreds walked the Walsh family farm in Ballylooby, Co Tipperary on Tuesday evening 10 June to see the steps being taken to protect the environment.

John and Brendan Walsh won the 2024 Teagasc/FBD Environmental Sustainability Awards. They milk 165 cows on a platform of 63ha and a total grassland area of 107ha, and supply Dairygold co-op.

Teagasc said that it was clear for visitors to see the work put in to maintain and enhance the hedgerows, planting new hedges, and managing existing ones to provide food for the birds, pollen for the pollinators and shelter and shade for the livestock.

Twenty pollinators were found on the farm when the biodiversity assessment was carried out on the farm in 2022 as part of the Teagasc Signpost programme.

John Walsh outlined the care he takes when planting a new hedgerow, from selecting the plant mix, to pruning in the first three years, and then the management subsequently to ensure a wide base, eight foot tall wtih whitethorns flourishing every 50 metres.

Clover

The adoption of technologies is also evident all around the farm. Clover rich swards allow less chemical nitrogen to be applied while small areas of multispecies swards, containing chicory, plantain, white and red clover and ryegrass were planted two years ago to see what they can contribute to the farming system.

Breeding

Brendan Walsh spoke about the years of selective breeding using the Economic Breeding Index (EBI) to make informed breeding decisions, which has led to a fine herd of cows producing an average of 524kg of milk solids per cow per year, while the carbon footprint of the milk produced is 10% lower than the national average. The carbon footprint was 0.86 kg CO2 eq/kg FPCM in 2024.

The Walsh family are also taking action to protect water quality. They have reduced their chemical fertilizer use by 40%, using 130kg of N per hectare per year across the farm, while producing 13.7t of grass dry matter. They spread all their slurry using low emission slurry spreading techniques (LESS), have fenced off all water courses, use GPS for precision application and created buffer strips beside water bodies.