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Completed a full-time Green Cert
Kieran McDonagh farms sheep and sucklers with his father near Corofin, Co Galway. He completed the full-time Level 6 Advanced Certificate in Mountbellew Agricultural College.
“I found it very time consuming for something that is not much benefit to you until you get the farm. My brother did the course 10 years ago and he only had to do one year.
“They brought in the second year when I started. I had to do two placements – four months for each one. We had to do a full second year and we didn’t need to in my opinion. I have the exact same thing as my brother but I had to do a second year.
“My opinion is that Teagasc were looking at the bigger farmers rather than the smaller farmers, they had to teach us the profit monitor and I won’t ever use it. I just wanted to be out and farming.”
Half-way through the part-time Green Cert
Mary Molloy is from a suckler farm in Ballingarry, Thurles, Co Tipperary, and is in the middle of completing her Green Cert part time at Kildalton. She thinks the two years in the current format is needed as it is very hard to squeeze all of the content in.
“I do it part time in Kildalton. The dream is to run a crèche on the farm and go down the dairy route. There’s no money in beef. The two years at the moment is enough. I go after work on a Tuesday and Thursday from 6.30pm to 9.30pm. That’s those whole two days gone, they don’t exist to me anymore as I’m gone to work in the crèche at 8am and not home until ten or half ten,” she told Irish Country Living.
She believes requiring more study time from students, as proposed by Teagasc, “will turn students off” the Green Cert.
“You have people that love books but my take on it is that I’d rather be doing farming. There’s a lot in the two years now that I won’t use.
“We had a manual-handling course about posture and lifting things, but you’d be so busy farming that you’re not going to be thinking about bending your knees the right way,” she said. CL
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