I farm: “With my father, David, and brother, Glen, on our 210-cow spring-calving dairy farm. Glen is in Ballyhaise ag college at the moment on his placement. Myself, I did sustainable agriculture a course run between Dundalk IT and Ballyhaise.”

Calving: “Overall it went well this year, we have 10 left to go now. We just had one case of milk fever and the odd calf coming the wrong way.”

Grass: “We have 50% of the farm grazed so far this spring, we are well behind target due to the bad weather. The soil on the farm is very heavy too.”

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Breeding: “We synchronise all the heifers and AI them with sexed semen, then two Hereford bulls go in with them. They are with a contract-rearer over the road for the second grazing season so we do the AI over there. It’s all AI for the cows, sexed semen for the first three weeks and then beef breeds like whiteheads and Belgian Blues. Dad and I have the AI course done so we manage it between us.”

Collars: “All you have to do is click a button on the phone and an app picks up everything to automatically draft for bulling from the collars. There’s no work to it compared to what we used to be at.”

Production: “At the moment, we are doing an average of 26l of milk, 4.55% butterfat and 3.45% protein. The cows are getting 4kg of meal, 12kg dry matter grass and 3kg of silage per day. They get the silage at night after the evening grazing.”

Pasture progress awards: “We just got a call one day that we were winners of the pasture progress awards for Cavan and the Ulster/Connacht region – we weren’t expecting it. I do all of the grass measuring on the farm myself and we input the fertiliser and as much information as we can on PastureBase. I find it important to stay consistent with it.”

Farm open day: “We had an open day on the farm last July run by Lakeland Dairies and Teagasc as we put in a 40-unit rotary milking parlour a couple of years ago. It’s day and night compared to our old parlour.”