'The end of this chapter' - Carlow farmer sells his cows

While dairy dispersal sales are a weekly event as we come up towards spring calving, there is one imminent sale that has set the entire country talking.

Jamie Kealy has become a very well-known farmer since entering dairying in 2012, as quotas were about to disappear.

His story, as first a new entrant to farming, and then a new entrant to dairying, caught the imagination. So the fact that he is selling his herd next week has come as a shock.

Jamie started out as a builder, like his father and generations before him, but was always farming-mad. Together with his wife Lorraine, he initially bought 16ac just outside Ballon, Co Carlow, and built a family home.

He also built a farmyard and built up a small suckler herd there, adding in some more purchased and rented land.

His life changed when he built a shed for another farmer about 10 miles away near Killerig. He formed a close bond with the man, Thomas McDonald, and in 2012 agreed to lease his holding to set up a dairy herd on the farm.

Jamie’s attention to detail and quality of farming made him one of the stars of post-quota dairy expansion.

Farm walk

In 2017, he hosted the Irish Grassland Association dairy summer farm walk, and he was one of Teagasc/Tirlán’s monitor farms.

Thomas McDonald passed away in 2021. The Kealys were recently given the opportunity to purchase the farm prior to it being offered for public auction, but at a price they felt they couldn’t reach without risking everything they had built up.

So, they made the difficult decision to exit dairy farming and sell the herd.

The Kealys have a simple philosophy – breed cows of high genetic potential, and then support the cow in every way possible to allow her deliver on that potential. “We always prioritised fertility number one.

The key to a profitable cow is a long lactation – get her in calf early. If a cow calves late, no matter how high her output, she’ll never catch up.”

Jamie operated a traffic light system for breeding. “We put on tailpaint 28 days before we would start our breeding programme. After 21 days we would look for any cows that still had paint on; it meant they hadn’t come into heat. We would then check those cows to see if there was any problem to be addressed before breeding commenced”.

The system worked, with over 85% of the herd holding to the first serving every year, and 95% of cows calving in six weeks.

The other key breeding trait was milk solids, with the herd producing over 580kg per cow up to the end of October last year.

Pressures

Such a tight calving period brought its own pressures for Jamie, so calves were moved to the small farm Jamie owned, and Lorraine took over the management of them, allowing Jamie to focus on calving.

With assistance from their two children, Ailbhe (14) and James (11), the calves got a great start in life, which contributed to heifers weighing 370kg at first service.

Jamie is returning to building for now, and has a number of jobs for farmers lined up already, but it’s clear that the Kealy family’s dairy farming journey is far from over. “It’s just the end of this chapter,” Jamie says “it’s a hard thing to do, but it’s the right thing to do”.

The herd dispersal sale takes place next Wednesday.