Milking 500 dairy cows on a GEA rotary

I have always been interested in agriculture. I grew up on a sheep and suckler farm, and now I’m studying Animal and Crop Production at UCD. I love working with animals and being outside, and after studying ag science for the Leaving Cert, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the sector.

One of the reasons I chose this course was the long work placement opportunity. We work on different farm enterprises which include beef, dairy, sheep, pigs and tillage from January to August during third year, which amounts to 30 weeks of placement.

I was lucky enough to go abroad this summer for a couple of months.

I spent six weeks in the Netherlands, working in Dairy Campus – which is a state-of-the-art research farm that is closely linked with Wageningen University.

They milk 500 cows on a 40-bail GEA rotary and also use a milking robot which can milk 40 to 50 cows. It is a Holstein herd that calves year-round.

The farm is situated on 300 hectares of land and the cows are housed almost all the time, depending on what research trials are ongoing.

It has great facilities for collecting data from the cows including Greenfeeds for measuring methane and CO² emissions and RIC bins which scans each cow’s collar to measure how much forage she consumes.

In the feedbarn, the RIC bins are filled with a Trioliet automatic feeding system. There are also eight fistulated cows which allows for extensive research into the rumen of the animal.

Large-scale pig unit

I then travelled to Germany for four weeks to work on a large-scale pig unit which operates under the name Emerald Irish Pork. The farm is located in a small village called Rietz which is about an hour west of Berlin.

It is owned by the Costello family from Galway. They also have 1,100 dairy cows and 2,000 hectares of tillage ground.

With almost 30,000 pigs in the unit in Rietz, I realised I was going to have a busy few weeks. The pig farm has 4,500 sows and the pigs are kept until slaughter with some being sent to out-farms to be fattened. The breeds used are Danish Large White and German Landrace.

There is a biogas plant on-site which is where most of the pig slurry goes. It was a great experience to work on a farm of such a large scale. On my busiest day, 44 sows farrowed with 730 piglets being born.

The sheer scale of the farm in Germany was very different to what I was used to at home

I completed my beef placement in Teagasc Grange in January and February. They have the capacity for 1,100 cattle on the farm with 250 ha of grassland.

I got to help with a lot of sampling and be there for the beginning of their calving season. I then went to Padraic McMahon’s farm in north County Dublin to complete my pig placement.

The sheer scale of the farm in Germany was very different to what I was used to at home. Working with thousands of pigs was a bit overwhelming at first, but after the first week, you get used to the warm sheds and smells.

In the Netherlands, they have problems with geese grazing on new grass which can be difficult to control.

It was also interesting to see the difference in the flat landscape of the country. There were barely any fences around the fields even the ones with sheep in them, which I found very surprising.

There are loads of small canals surrounding most of the fields to help with drainage because of the high water table there, and these act as barriers for whatever livestock is in the field.

I think working on different farms gave me a good grasp of the course content so far and has set me up nicely for final year.

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