I farm: “About 130ac in Co Roscommon. The farm is split across three blocks of owned, rented and leased land across south Roscommon.”

Family: “I’m farming with my father Peter and my two sons, Martin and Shane. I work on the farm full-time. My sons have off-farm jobs and give me a hand in the evenings.”

Sucklers:”We keep suckler cows, weanlings, maiden heifers, in-calf heifers and also bucket-fed calves reared to beef.”

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Stock: “We run 50 suckler cows, 10 of those are pedigree Simmentals. Our commercial cows consist of Simmental, Limousin and Belgian Blue crosses. We purchase 35 Angus calves every spring and rear them for beef. It creates extra income for us and works well.”

Breeding: “We calve 60% in the spring and then 40% in the autumn. We have a Simmental stock bull on-farm, but we mainly use AI. I do my own AI. We use Simmental, Limousin, Belgian Blue and Charolais. We try to match the best bull suited to the cow. There’s a mix of straws in the pot ready. Breeding went well, out of 40 cows there’s two not in-calf, which you can expect. The cows seemed to go back in calf this year better than other years.”

Sales:”We sell some of our pedigree weanling heifers at the Simmental breeding sales in Ballymote and Gort Marts. We’ve previously got great prices for heifers in both. Autumn-born weanlings are sold averaging 450kg at 10 months of age in the marts.

Weaning: “The spring calves are not weaned just yet, we’ll be starting to wean them in two weeks’ time. We were waiting until after the farm walk, as the event was covering weaning of spring calves, and we explained what we do and how we do it.”

Reseeding:”We try to reseed about 10% of the farm every year. It works well for us, we’ve found that the new reseed grows better grass at the shoulders of the year compared to the older swards.”