Starting out with €200 and more rushes than grass

Ten years ago when Gearoid and Sarah Maher started planning to milk cows near Cappamore, Co Limerick, as Gearoid said, they hadn’t much going for them.

A 72ha farm with heavy clay-type soil, €200 in the bank account, more rushes than grass, and no sheds of any value. However, they had a plan, a willingness to work hard, and a dream to continue a tradition of milking Friesians as two generations had done before them on this farm.

Today, the Mahers are milking 80 cows, delivering over 480kg of milk solids per cow mostly from grazed grass.

To make the repayments for the stocking loan, Gearoid worked off farm for Bandon Farm Supplies in Cork from 2011 to 2018. His father passed in late 2017 and that triggered Gearoid to go farming full-time. He set up a partnership with his wife Sarah who works full-time as an accountant.

Not content that he was fully employed, Gearoid started working part time with local consultant Martin Crowe. He prepared nutrient management and biodiversity plans for farmers. Gearoid liked the work and it allowed him experience ideas from other farmers.

Sarah and Gearoid have a special interest in the environment and one of the focus areas on their farm is reducing inputs that are sensitive to the environment. They want to do all this while managing a good work-life balance.

Gearoid is not farming in a nitrate derogation. In 2021 the farm was operating at about 130kg of organic nitrogen per hectare. Gearoid knows the land and what it can carry. When this land gets wet, it gets very wet.

Nutrient plan

The nutrient plan is built around using nutrients from the farm and Gearoid purchased a dribble bar to make this possible. The cost was €30,000, but a TAMS grant of €10,000 left the tank net cost at €20,000. The plan is to improve soil fertility using lime, slurry and clover. A GPS for the fertiliser spreader was also purchased in March 2021 at a cost of €1,700.

There are 20 acres of forestry on the farm – a mix of hardwoods like oak, ash and sycamore with the other half in spruce. The forestry is due for clear felling, but Gearoid is planning to take out 75% of the weaker trees to allow the rest mature into a natural woodland. Part of the plan is to let the cows into the forestry every 40 to 50 days to encourage some different plant species to grow.

Feed usage was reduced from over 1,000kg per cow to 700kg per cow in 2021. Milk delivered was 484,000kg which converted to 37,600kg of milk solids or 485kg of milk solids per cow for the 78 cows milking.