I farm: “28ha of owned land. Four generations of the family have farmed that over time. I have two sons here working with me, Adam and Luke. They’re 16 and 18. It’s all sucklers we have; 20 suckler cows, all pedigree Salers. The majority of our stock is sold for breeding. We’re spring calving, so we’ve a couple of weeks free now and then we start into it.”

This week: “We’re getting the calving bays set up and the calving pens. We’re counting down to the beginning of February, when we start calving. Then it will be flat-out for February and March, and we have a couple of stragglers there in April.”

Change: “We had been milking cows up to the mid-90s; 15 or 16 cows, like a lot of small farmers. We took a lot of the replacement cows for our suckler herd off those dairy cows. I found that, especially around calving time, it became too difficult to work the farm on a part-time basis. I looked into the Salers breed and everything came out as positive in terms of low input, easy calving, calves that thrive. That’s when we started going down the Salers route.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Salers: “In 2003 we purchased our first Salers heifer and from then on we’ve phased out all the commercial cows. My sons would have only seen a handful of calves in their entire lives assisted at birth. Salers calve very easily. My wife works off-farm as well, so there’s no one here during the day. The farm needs to run itself for the eight or nine hours that we’re away.”

Polled gene: “In 2017 I purchased a polled Salers heifer at the Castle Douglas sale in Scotland. For 10 years now we have been using the polled gene. Almost all the breeding heifers and cows in the herd have the polled gene. I haven’t been able to keep up with the demand for polled bulls. We’ve sent bulls all over the country and this year our first polled bull went to a farm in the UK.”

Quotable quote: “We will look and see how Mercosur plays out and what happens there. The Irish farmer has been resilient.”