'It’s back to the grindstone'

Stand in the Gap with Kathleen Duffy

What a spring we are having weather wise. We will soon be able to turn out the cows that are freshly calved for a few hours if the weather continues as it is. We used sexed semen to breed our replacements this year and are lucky so far with heifer calves. These will go to be future cows and will stay on the farm for a long time. We have calf coats on most of them to keep them warm in the frosty weather.

We have one pure bred jersey cow which was bought as a calf in 2018, the only purchase we have done in 20 years. She has now had her second replacement calf. She is a beauty but so small and fragile looking a bit like Bambi. We have called her Brigid because she was born on 1st February.

Springtime

For the last two weeks the calving season has started in earnest and is in full swing. Calf registration is done on the smartphone with AgriNet HerdAPP. The mobile is constantly synced to keep up-to-date for everyone. Then we know the “due to calve date”, “out of retention dates” and any other information that is needed.

Antibiotics are a big issue, and with new certifications in progress, farmers are keeping good records of the drug cabinet on the farm, what is bought with the batch and expiry dates, and then what animals are administered either in batch data entry or individual animals. Luckily we haven’t had to use much so far. This is especially true for Dry Cow therapy and Lakeland Dairies do not want milk from any cow until 5 days after calving even if well out of retention. This makes for a very busy time down on the farm.

We passed the Bord Bia inspection and are delighted with the accuracy and volume of data on the HerdApp that makes life easy for these inspections. On the environment, we all need to get our Bord Bia certificate and our Origin Green carbon footprint from the enterprise. Here on the farm they looked at the slurry management, nitrogen usage, grazing season, energy efficiency and EBIs. We got slurry out the first days of February but we went very light with the contractor using trailing shoe so as to reduce any losses of precious nitrogen.

On the Farm

We are hoping to have a student from Ballyhaise College to help relieve some of the spring workload and to learn the ropes on a busy dairy farm. While Thomas has finished as President of Macra last May, he is still very involved in CEJA, the European young farmers in Brussels as a vice President and Treasurer. The workload gets very heavy as we go into March. We bought the protected urea same as last year. Last year’s calves have gone out to one of the outlying plots of land.

When you hear people saying to shop around for inputs etc. they don’t realise that it is so time consuming to do so. We are in the process of changing bank accounts and it is a huge job.

Other jobs put on the long finger this winter are the VAT refund application, soil sampling and measuring grass. It must be my age, but I procrastinate about everything. Paperwork is constant and one gets weary of constantly researching and filling in passwords and logins for everything. We haven’t actually done anything about putting solar panels on the milking parlour, though they seem to be a no brainer as well as other efficiencies around the farm.

Community

This week we met in the Show Centre with a few members of our farming community to see should we progress our long held ambition to add value to our produce, along with the possibility of food tourism. This was one of the first reasons to build the Centre, but time and volunteering got in the way of progressing this ambition.

Congratulations to Mullagh Activity Hub and to Cross Hall for all the events they are running this spring. It is great to see all the local faces on Operation Transformation. Back in the early 1970s Cross Hall was the revamped old school with a black Stanley range in the meeting room. There were very few facilities and the ICA set the upgrading in motion, then a new Hall committee was put in place. I wonder are all those that have gone to their eternal reward, smiling down on the aerial video of Cross Hall playing a role in a national event.

Virginia Show Centre is getting back in action again. The Men’s Shed are up and away with themselves and it is hard to get a room free at some pinch times. All great to see, now that people are out of the lockdowns, though the virus continues.