I farm: “With a lot of my family. My mother Anne, brothers Conor and Liam and sister Charlotte are involved with the dairy farm in Ballylooby, milking about 400 cows and myself, my father Charlie and sister Jill are mostly involved with the pigs in Araglin. I also have two sisters working full-time outside of the farm, Maria and Ellen.”

Pigs: “We have over 500 sows. We have an integrated unit with the whole lot from birth to finishing on the farm here. We also have a couple of satellite units where we take some weaners off to go for finishing. Monday is our busiest day of the week as we have weaning of the bonhams from their mothers after four weeks. Those sows are then moved to the dry sow house. The same day we bring in the next batch of sows from the dry sow house to farrow down in three to four days.”

Breeds: “We have crossed Landrace, Large White sows with Duroc AI. We find them a really nice breed and more docile. They have a lovely colour to them, some with orange and black spots."

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Scanning and vaccinating: “Every week is quite repetitive, we go around the dry sow house scanning to see which sows are in-pig. Every Friday/Saturday we serve all the sows that were weaned on the previous Monday using AI. We use a needle-free vaccination gun which we find great as it reduces the stress on the animals.”

Feed: “We buy in all of our grain in bulk and mill it ourselves on the farm.”

Genesus: “We are Genesus approved, so we go to Karro in Cookstown, Co Tyrone with finished pigs and get a bit more of a premium with that. It a very high standard of welfare, and that’s what we like about it. It’s big on enrichment, like toys for the pigs to play with.”

Irish Pig Health Society: “I’m part of the society and we have an event every year. It’s coming up on 14 April. It’s a lovely day out, we have up to 40 trade stands and it's great to meet people within the industry. I’m also on the IFA pig committee.”

Grá for pigs: “The main reason why I love pigs is because they thrive so quickly, they’re amazing animals, so efficient, I get great satisfaction from that.”