There was eight of us here at home, I’ve three brothers and four sisters. We have a beef and sheep farm in Co Westmeath.

If one of us came home from school and someone had said something mean to them, it was a kind of tough love. If you’re going to fall down every time someone tries to push you over, you’re not going to get anywhere. So you need to just keep going.

My parents were busy trying to run a farm. They tried to give all of us the attitude that, if you’re going to feel sorry for yourself just because someone doesn’t like what you’re doing, you’re never going to get anywhere.

When we were younger they would say: “If you want to do something just get up and do it. Don’t wait for someone to hand you something”. At the time, we probably thought we were being hard done by, not getting the sympathy we came home looking for, but we definitely benefited in the long run.

I was always outside on the farm. Two of my brothers are older than me. With them being the eldest, they just did a lot of the work. They’re in New York working in construction now.

I never really considered the possibility of farming as a full-time job – I just loved animals. It was probably only when I was in secondary school and doing ag science that I started to think about farming seriously.

The ag path

Filling out the CAO in Leaving Cert, I had no idea what to do. I changed it and changed it. At the time, myself and my sister were working for a landscaper locally.

We would be sewing lawns and things, I loved it.

I had down horticulture, agriculture, journalism, law and a few different things. I just kept changing them around. The week the CAO was due, my mother was like, ‘You may just decide now’ because every day I was panicking changing it around.

In the end, I had horticulture first, then agriculture and the rest of them. I ended up getting offered my first choice. I was raging I didn’t put ag first. I went to Kildalton and Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) studying horticulture.

I absolutely hated it, but I was nearly afraid to say I was going to dropout. I did it for a year and then I left to go back to do ag in WIT as well. Going back to do ag was the best thing I’ve ever done. Ever since then, everything just came naturally and fell into place.

I graduated in 2019. A lot of my friends and classmates were going back to do a Master’s. I thought, maybe I should be doing this? Just because they were, I was nearly going to fill out these Master’s applications for the sake of it. I thought about it, and realised I would rather be at the primary producer end of things.

I went home and I picked up a job with cows.ie. I had been relief milking for them anyway. They’re livestock suppliers and only down the road from me. I worked there for the rest of the year, six months full time and learned a lot.

My first real taste of milking had been in second year of college. I went on placement to a dairy farm in Scotland and I loved it. I had done a small bit of relief milking before that.

January just gone, I started a new job on a newly established dairy farm. It would have been tillage and sheep before. I usually milk in the mornings. There’s 400 cows, so by the time you get them all in, you’d want to be milking before seven. I go and milk somewhere else then in the evening and I do a bit at home too, of course.

Showing the journey

A few weeks ago, I was on an RTÉ TV show CookIn, presented by chef Mark Moriarty. I was talking about food provenience and farming. It was through my Instagram page, @emmamc_farmingqueen, that I got noticed for it.

I think showing people the food journey does make a difference – showing people the work that goes into the food before it gets to their plate.

Some people wouldn’t agree with me, but I think producers do have a responsibility to show people where what they’re eating comes from.

Some farmers would be private enough. They don’t want to share their life and that’s totally acceptable, but if a few of us could share the work that goes into the product, it would make a big difference.

I would like to work for myself in the long run. Everyone locally is always asking: ‘Have ye gone into dairy yet’ or ‘Have ye the parlour up yet?’ Everyone would be slagging and slagging Dad as well, because they know I’m mad about dairy.

I might be looking at leasing a farm until Dad’s finished. At the moment, I’m just reminding myself that I’m still only 24 and I think if I can gain a bit of knowledge everywhere I work, I’d be better off at the end, rather than jumping into it now. I’d have a good knowledge now, but I think there’s so much more to learn.

In the next 10 years, I’d see myself running my own farm. I’m trying not to panic and rush into something, because every year I look back on where I was a year previous or even six months previous, and the first thing I always think is, God, how much I know now that I didn’t then.

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