The next stop on the judges’ tour was the Cremin farm in Gneeveguilla, south Kerry. Diarmuid Cremin is milking 68 high-EBI cows on a difficult enough farm in terms of soil type.

The farm comprises about 80ac in total, with 21 very good acres, 15 average acres and the rest is “coarse ground”. Thirty acres of the milking platform are leased.

A former member of the Kerry-Teagasc joint programme, Diarmuid is an active member of discussion groups and focuses on areas that will deliver most profit, such as growing grass and utilising this grass with efficient cows.

Last year, the farm grew an impressive 14t DM/ha and the cows delivered 490kg MS/cow from 850kg of meal.

The herd EBI is impressive at €218, making it into the top 1% of the highest EBI herds in the country.

Two bull calves from the farm were sold to AI companies this spring. The herd predicted transmitting ability (PTA) for fat and protein is 0.20% and 0.14%, respectively, which is high.

All animals in the herd have been genotyped. So far this year, fat has averaged 4.52% and protein has averaged 3.51%. The bulls have been purchased from first-lactation cows.

Calving interval is 366 days and the six-week in-calf rate in 2021 was an impressive 91%. Average protein for the year last year was 3.80%, up from 3.60% in 2015.

Over the same period, fat increased by 0.39% to 4.55%. Diarmuid worked out that this improvement is worth over €10,000 per year for a herd of 65 cows.

Reseeding, establishing more clover, using protected urea, reducing nitrogen use, using low emission slurry spreading (LESS) and spot-spraying instead of blanket-spraying are all being done to make the farm more sustainable. There is also a big focus on soil fertility, on what is a challenging farm in terms of soil type.

Last year, there was no cow empty after 11 weeks of breeding, but the year before there were 14 cows empty.

Diarmuid has a love-hate relationship with farm roadways. On the one hand, the construction of roadways through his fields has revolutionised the farm and enabled much greater use of the good land in bad weather and the bad land in good weather.

However, some of the roads are now after sinking below the surface of the fields and need to be topped up. He’s a big fan of cow tracks and has permanent tracks installed along the centre of one of his biggest fields.