To get your ticket for the event, simply collect 3 tokens from the Irish Farmers Journal over the next three weeks and bring them along with you on the day or buy your ticket HERE

The format of Dairy Day is unlike any other event. The tagline is solutions for an expanding sector. The background is that milk production has increased by 50% over the last five years and is forecast to continue increasing. This is presenting farmers with great opportunities, but also challenges. Dairy Day will present solutions for some of these challenges.

The venue is the event centre at Punchestown – over 1.2 acres under roof and only a few miles from the M7 motorway. There will be two stages; on one stage is the Skills Hub. Here, Aidan Brennan demonstrates, with expert help, six key skills needed to be a dairy farmer today:

  • Efficient milking routine.
  • Body condition scoring and mobility scoring cows.
  • Doing a cashflow forecast.
  • Managing people.
  • Grassland management.
  • Essential grazing infrastructure.

    • Each session runs for 30 minutes starting at 10am and is repeated in the afternoon starting at 1pm. At the essential grazing infrastructure session, Aidan will be joined on stage by Bertie Troy from Grasstec along with Brian Ronayne from Dungourney in Cork. Brian entered into a partnership in 2009 and has seen his herd size increase from 48 cows to milking 420 cows.

    Using drone footage we will see how grazing infrastructure has evolved to cater for the larger numbers and bigger milking platform.

    Herd size is irrelevant – cows need to move from field to yard to parlour in an efficient way whether there are 40 or 400 cows being milked. What did Brian do? What worked well and what didn’t and what would he change if he were to do it again?

    The session will cover roadways, water supply and sizing, paddock size and the farmyard itself – milking, housing, calving area and calf rearing.

    On the other stage, Jack Kennedy steers a helicopter view of the dairy industry in Ireland and around the world. One of the morning sessions deals with international milk markets and there will be market analysts from Ireland, New Zealand, Brazil, Holland and the US explaining where they see milk prices going in the years ahead.

    Greg Gent is flying in from New Zealand. He is one of the original directors of New Zealand’s largest dairy co-operative Fonterra. Greg will answer questions on all the key issues around New Zealand dairy farming. What might be the impact of a changing political landscape on New Zealand dairying? Are large scale herds the only way to survive in New Zealand? Will New Zealand milk production continue to grow?