The journal vet caught up with John Pringle last week, a beef and sheep farmer in Aughrim.

John was reflecting on his toughest year since taking the reins of his family farm.

An optimist by nature, John said the conditions were testing and he acknowledged the value of having a network of farmers to talk to through the challenges in his local discussion groups.

He is also looking at options on his farm around environmental sustainability and has a keen interest in farming trends in the sector.

The club

John and his local vet Mark Drought set up Ireland's first flock health club last year.

The club formed when his discussion group and his local vet gathered a group of sheep farmers with the focus of improving their flocks over all health.

The club met four times during the year for meetings that lasted two hours.

The programme involved tailored flock health plans for the members and some diagnostic tests throughout the year.

The tests included four to six faecal egg counts (FEC) some post mortems and +/- mineral blood samples.

The cost to join the flock health club was €280 and included meetings, diagnostics and flock health plan.

Their was also the option with blood tests for abortion and other sheep diseases.

Lessons

John said it was a good investment of time and money.

One point he found interesting is that most of the group would now consider using footvax to vaccinate against footrot before housing.

This is a vaccine that works really well when part of a management plan for lameness.

The timing, as John explained is important also to make sure it is injected prior to the risk. For most of them this is before housing.

We discussed antibiotic usage on-farm, he is using practically no antibiotics on the flock of nearly 250 ewes.

He used two bottles of antibiotics across the whole lambing season, last year mostly for any ewe that had a hard lambing. With a painkiller/antibiotic combo, he also saw dramatic reductions in usage for antibiotics with the footrot vaccine.

It is quite a unique selling point of many sheep farms if they use little antibiotics.

Looking to the future of sheep and cattle industries, John believes “there will be no white knight” for the suckler industry and that we will potentially see a drop in the national herd.

On the lamb market in Ireland and abroad John agreed that lamb has so much untapped potential as a healthy-eating option for the consumer.

Parting ways in the yard, the journal vet thought how lucky our industry is to have passionate farmers like John.