I farm: “About 400 acres with my wife, Jody, my four children, Faye, Ella, Matt and Conor, and my parents, Seán and Teresa. I have just finished a 25-year career in engineering and moved to full-time farming. Over the last number of years, I have prepared for that move with investment in mechanisation of the farm to prepare for my homecoming.”

Farm walk: “We had an EIP Farming for Water event last week. This water quality event was after we received funding for a series of water protection measures and we will be implementing these over the coming months.”

Technology: “We have four Lely A5 robots and the latest 24-volt Discovery collector unit. We also installed a new Lely Discovery this week.”

This week: “We have 60 heifers coming through this year and we’re bringing down batches of cows and training them on the robotic milking system over a four-day period. We introduce them to the robot and over the period the heifers will naturally walk in themselves and get used to the Texas gate.”

Milking: “We’re milking 245 cows, mainly British Frieisen Holstein crosses. Our EBI is around €185, our milk solids for the 2024 period will be 530kg. We are striving towards a ‘black and white’, high EBI, high solids herd. This year we have moved from an autumn-spring herd to a full spring herd and because we have a robotic milking system, there’s a couple of advantages that we have. We hold cows that are not in-calf and continue to milk them through the winter. We are calving from the first week in February so we milk on with anything that is producing over 10l and are late calvers.”

Breeding: “We’ve two Angus bulls. With our heifers, we use sexed semen on the first pass and they are then released to a bull for sweep up on second and third pass. They are all scanned eight to 12 weeks after and I am happy with this years’ results.”