It’s not often that Irish Country Living ends up on assignment in an urban part of Dublin, but when we visit St John of God girls’ national school in Artane, the third-class pupils are just about to start their FaceTime call with Kerry dairy farmer Karol Kissane.
And they are full of questions.
“Do the cows keep you up at night? Do you rather the milk off your cows or do you rather the milk from the shops? Is it stressful being a farmer? How many tractors do you own? If you weren’t a farmer, what would you be?...”
“What do you call a grumpy cow?” chimes in one of the girls.
“I don’t know,” responds Karol, who is video-calling from one of his fields amongst his herd.
“A moo-dy cow,” she responds, as her classmates collapse into giggles.
What is supposed to be a 10-minute call soon turns into half an hour, as Karol talks the girls through everything that is happening on the farm that day; from the use of tail paint to detect when a cow is going into heat to explaining the biodiversity of the hedgerows.
It’s all part of the FaceTime A Farmer pilot project that Karol hopes will help change young people’s perceptions about agriculture and maybe even plant the seed for a future career in the industry.
Farming to finance, and back
Raised on a suckler farm in Asdee, Co Kerry, Karol left school at 16 to go farming, before home-educating himself through his Leaving Cert to study business at CIT.
Joining the graduate programme with Bank of Ireland, he moved to Dublin and later qualified as a chartered accountant and tax adviser, but after meeting his wife Caroline and getting married in 2010, the couple decided to relocate to Kerry.
Karol Kissane pictured with Tom Martin, founder of FaceTime A Farmer in the UK.
“We were living in an apartment in Dublin, we wanted to start a family, the farm was here, so we decided we’d move down this way,” says Karol, whose plan was to stay working in finance while keeping the suckler farm going on the side.
Indeed, Karol soon found a job with the Lloyds Group and later as a tax manager with Fexco… but?
“We were just after having our son at that stage, but for some reason being back on the farm just was grabbing at me,” he says.
“There was maybe 150 acres, so realistically you weren’t going to make anything out of beef. So I’d never milked a cow in my life, but at this stage there was the new quotas coming in and that kind of thing for new entrants, so I applied for that and I got it.”
So on 1 February 2013 – the day his first cow calved – Karol left his job to go full-time into dairy farming and now milks just over 100 cows in his mostly Friesian-Holstein herd. And as the farm has grown, so has his family, with son Tommy (eight in June) followed by Emily (six).
As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, however, last year Karol decided to apply for a Nuffield Scholarship where candidates are awarded a travel and study bursary to encourage the advancement of agriculture and rural development. Originally, his plan was to study the labour shortage in the dairy industry, but this later developed into looking at the public perception of farming – particularly amongst young people – and how to attract the next generation towards a career in agriculture.
“A lot of studies have been done and it shows that perceptions actually develop early in life and you don’t really change many of them, so that’s where it came towards primary schools,” explains Karol.
“It’s not kind of trying to say ‘you should drink milk or you should do this’, but it’s just to kind of open children’s minds to what agriculture is and just make them aware, ‘Well, this is what’s going on in the world of agriculture and there’s a lot that you can probably add as you grow up.’ You don’t have to be born on a farm to be involved in agriculture, to just make kids aware of that.”
Connecting with the children
The next challenge for Karol was to think of a way to connect primary school children with agriculture in a real way. While he acknowledges that farm visits are “brilliant”, they have their limitations.
“You’ve got the cost and you’ve got the time and you can’t get every kid out on to a farm and even if you do, how often can you get them there, especially from cities?” he says.
While travelling for the Nuffield Scholarship, however, Karol came across a project in the UK called FaceTime A Farmer. Founded by farmer Tom Martin and administered by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), the idea is simple but effective. Basically, individual farmers are paired with different classrooms across the country for a 10-minute call every fortnight through FaceTime or Skype to show what is happening on the farm, answer questions, and over time share a real understanding of agriculture and the issues that farmers face.
The kids kind of take over to tell you the truth… they run with it and all of a sudden there’s 30 minutes gone
Having met with both Tom and Julie Neale of LEAF, the group agreed to provide the administrative support to run a pilot project, which has seen Karol connect with the third-class girls in Artane since February.
Through the calls, Karol has introduced the students to newborn calves (which they got to name), explained the milking and breeding processes and grassland management, explored technology like Herdwatch and visited the bog and a local windfarm.
“The kids kind of take over to tell you the truth… they run with it and all of a sudden there’s 30 minutes gone,” he says.
As part of his overall Nuffield Scholarship, Karol hopes to develop several proposals of how children can learn more about agriculture through the current curriculum, in particular by linking in with the STEM subjects.
However, he sees the rollout of FaceTime A Farmer across Ireland as an affordable and effective method to achieve this, not just from his own experience but also from the two other farmers involved in the pilot: Kerry dairy farmer Pa O’Hanlon, who is linked with St Luke’s Montenotte in Cork, and Kilkenny vegetable and produce farmer Julian Hughes, who is linked with St Oliver’s national school in Ballylongford, Kerry.
In order to extend the project beyond the pilot, they will need to secure modest sponsorship to cover the administration costs to LEAF, who facilitate the farmer-school relationships.
They could come up with something unbelievable that will help everybody
But if it is successful, he hopes that long-term it might plant a seed for future careers in agriculture for children who may not even be from a farm background.
“We have all the problems of climate change and biodiversity loss and how are we going to feed nine billion people by 2050 – how many more billion will be there after it? Maybe it’s these children who are not connected to farming, maybe some of them will have some wild idea – who knows – in the future,” he says.
“They could come up with something unbelievable that will help everybody.”
To get involved as a sponsor for Facetime A Farmer or to participate as a farmer/school, email karolkissane@mail.com or Tweet to @dairytaxaccount
Find further information about the project in the UK here.
They’re They’re totally animal mad
Third-class teacher Laura De Nuinseann explains that before FaceTime A Farmer her students would have had a few misconceptions about agriculture in Ireland today; such as thinking that most farmers still milked all their cows by hand… and that they only ever wore dungarees!
“Their ideas of it were very old-fashioned, what they would have read in books or seen in films and cartoons,” she explains, adding that even school tours to local pet farms did not really give the girls “a realistic portrayal of a farm”.
Teacher Laura De Nuinseann believes that the FaceTime A Farmer project can play a valuable part in education across the curriculum. \ Ferdia Mooney
“They’re not seeing the nitty gritty of actual farming life; they’re not understanding that when you have a farm you’re getting up at 5am and 6am and you’re working for the whole day.”
However, it did not take long for the girls to start asking questions.
“The first week we FaceTimed Karol, it was in the shed where all the newborn calves were and instantly their interest was so high,” she says.
“They’re totally animal mad and they loved learning about the twin calves and how long it took them to be born and the fact that Karol had a video camera and was watching them.”
As well as learning about Karol’s farm, Laura explains how the pilot project has worked well with other parts of the curriculum.
“It would be great for oral language, for teaching new vocabulary. It would be great for teaching science, so plants and animals, living things, and for geography as well, sustainable energy, life in a rural area of Ireland, which is on the curriculum as well,” she lists.
“But even now, with the talk of calves and calving, it’s kind of coming into SPHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education) and new life as well, so it integrates all over the place.”
Indeed, it has also given them a greater understanding of the novel they are currently reading, Charlotte’s Web (which is set on a farm), while they have also started “farming” in their own class, growing salads and vegetables from seed.
What the students say…
Abby: “I didn’t know that there was a machine that milked all the cows. I thought that they did it by hand.”Rebecca: “I thought a dairy farmer would only have about seven or eight cows, but Karol has over 100 cows.” Camilla: “I’ve learned that a lot of the cows also have their babies like humans, they also have them in nine months.”Courtney: “I didn’t know that cows could have twins. I thought they could only have one; and I got to name them, Dizzy and Daisy.”Ava: “[Calving is probably the hardest thing about being a farmer] because you don’t get any sleep and you’d be very tired and then having tons and tons of babies on your hands.”Demi: “I would love to be a farmer because I just love taking care of the animals.”
It’s not often that Irish Country Living ends up on assignment in an urban part of Dublin, but when we visit St John of God girls’ national school in Artane, the third-class pupils are just about to start their FaceTime call with Kerry dairy farmer Karol Kissane.
And they are full of questions.
“Do the cows keep you up at night? Do you rather the milk off your cows or do you rather the milk from the shops? Is it stressful being a farmer? How many tractors do you own? If you weren’t a farmer, what would you be?...”
“What do you call a grumpy cow?” chimes in one of the girls.
“I don’t know,” responds Karol, who is video-calling from one of his fields amongst his herd.
“A moo-dy cow,” she responds, as her classmates collapse into giggles.
What is supposed to be a 10-minute call soon turns into half an hour, as Karol talks the girls through everything that is happening on the farm that day; from the use of tail paint to detect when a cow is going into heat to explaining the biodiversity of the hedgerows.
It’s all part of the FaceTime A Farmer pilot project that Karol hopes will help change young people’s perceptions about agriculture and maybe even plant the seed for a future career in the industry.
Farming to finance, and back
Raised on a suckler farm in Asdee, Co Kerry, Karol left school at 16 to go farming, before home-educating himself through his Leaving Cert to study business at CIT.
Joining the graduate programme with Bank of Ireland, he moved to Dublin and later qualified as a chartered accountant and tax adviser, but after meeting his wife Caroline and getting married in 2010, the couple decided to relocate to Kerry.
Karol Kissane pictured with Tom Martin, founder of FaceTime A Farmer in the UK.
“We were living in an apartment in Dublin, we wanted to start a family, the farm was here, so we decided we’d move down this way,” says Karol, whose plan was to stay working in finance while keeping the suckler farm going on the side.
Indeed, Karol soon found a job with the Lloyds Group and later as a tax manager with Fexco… but?
“We were just after having our son at that stage, but for some reason being back on the farm just was grabbing at me,” he says.
“There was maybe 150 acres, so realistically you weren’t going to make anything out of beef. So I’d never milked a cow in my life, but at this stage there was the new quotas coming in and that kind of thing for new entrants, so I applied for that and I got it.”
So on 1 February 2013 – the day his first cow calved – Karol left his job to go full-time into dairy farming and now milks just over 100 cows in his mostly Friesian-Holstein herd. And as the farm has grown, so has his family, with son Tommy (eight in June) followed by Emily (six).
As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, however, last year Karol decided to apply for a Nuffield Scholarship where candidates are awarded a travel and study bursary to encourage the advancement of agriculture and rural development. Originally, his plan was to study the labour shortage in the dairy industry, but this later developed into looking at the public perception of farming – particularly amongst young people – and how to attract the next generation towards a career in agriculture.
“A lot of studies have been done and it shows that perceptions actually develop early in life and you don’t really change many of them, so that’s where it came towards primary schools,” explains Karol.
“It’s not kind of trying to say ‘you should drink milk or you should do this’, but it’s just to kind of open children’s minds to what agriculture is and just make them aware, ‘Well, this is what’s going on in the world of agriculture and there’s a lot that you can probably add as you grow up.’ You don’t have to be born on a farm to be involved in agriculture, to just make kids aware of that.”
Connecting with the children
The next challenge for Karol was to think of a way to connect primary school children with agriculture in a real way. While he acknowledges that farm visits are “brilliant”, they have their limitations.
“You’ve got the cost and you’ve got the time and you can’t get every kid out on to a farm and even if you do, how often can you get them there, especially from cities?” he says.
While travelling for the Nuffield Scholarship, however, Karol came across a project in the UK called FaceTime A Farmer. Founded by farmer Tom Martin and administered by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), the idea is simple but effective. Basically, individual farmers are paired with different classrooms across the country for a 10-minute call every fortnight through FaceTime or Skype to show what is happening on the farm, answer questions, and over time share a real understanding of agriculture and the issues that farmers face.
The kids kind of take over to tell you the truth… they run with it and all of a sudden there’s 30 minutes gone
Having met with both Tom and Julie Neale of LEAF, the group agreed to provide the administrative support to run a pilot project, which has seen Karol connect with the third-class girls in Artane since February.
Through the calls, Karol has introduced the students to newborn calves (which they got to name), explained the milking and breeding processes and grassland management, explored technology like Herdwatch and visited the bog and a local windfarm.
“The kids kind of take over to tell you the truth… they run with it and all of a sudden there’s 30 minutes gone,” he says.
As part of his overall Nuffield Scholarship, Karol hopes to develop several proposals of how children can learn more about agriculture through the current curriculum, in particular by linking in with the STEM subjects.
However, he sees the rollout of FaceTime A Farmer across Ireland as an affordable and effective method to achieve this, not just from his own experience but also from the two other farmers involved in the pilot: Kerry dairy farmer Pa O’Hanlon, who is linked with St Luke’s Montenotte in Cork, and Kilkenny vegetable and produce farmer Julian Hughes, who is linked with St Oliver’s national school in Ballylongford, Kerry.
In order to extend the project beyond the pilot, they will need to secure modest sponsorship to cover the administration costs to LEAF, who facilitate the farmer-school relationships.
They could come up with something unbelievable that will help everybody
But if it is successful, he hopes that long-term it might plant a seed for future careers in agriculture for children who may not even be from a farm background.
“We have all the problems of climate change and biodiversity loss and how are we going to feed nine billion people by 2050 – how many more billion will be there after it? Maybe it’s these children who are not connected to farming, maybe some of them will have some wild idea – who knows – in the future,” he says.
“They could come up with something unbelievable that will help everybody.”
To get involved as a sponsor for Facetime A Farmer or to participate as a farmer/school, email karolkissane@mail.com or Tweet to @dairytaxaccount
Find further information about the project in the UK here.
They’re They’re totally animal mad
Third-class teacher Laura De Nuinseann explains that before FaceTime A Farmer her students would have had a few misconceptions about agriculture in Ireland today; such as thinking that most farmers still milked all their cows by hand… and that they only ever wore dungarees!
“Their ideas of it were very old-fashioned, what they would have read in books or seen in films and cartoons,” she explains, adding that even school tours to local pet farms did not really give the girls “a realistic portrayal of a farm”.
Teacher Laura De Nuinseann believes that the FaceTime A Farmer project can play a valuable part in education across the curriculum. \ Ferdia Mooney
“They’re not seeing the nitty gritty of actual farming life; they’re not understanding that when you have a farm you’re getting up at 5am and 6am and you’re working for the whole day.”
However, it did not take long for the girls to start asking questions.
“The first week we FaceTimed Karol, it was in the shed where all the newborn calves were and instantly their interest was so high,” she says.
“They’re totally animal mad and they loved learning about the twin calves and how long it took them to be born and the fact that Karol had a video camera and was watching them.”
As well as learning about Karol’s farm, Laura explains how the pilot project has worked well with other parts of the curriculum.
“It would be great for oral language, for teaching new vocabulary. It would be great for teaching science, so plants and animals, living things, and for geography as well, sustainable energy, life in a rural area of Ireland, which is on the curriculum as well,” she lists.
“But even now, with the talk of calves and calving, it’s kind of coming into SPHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education) and new life as well, so it integrates all over the place.”
Indeed, it has also given them a greater understanding of the novel they are currently reading, Charlotte’s Web (which is set on a farm), while they have also started “farming” in their own class, growing salads and vegetables from seed.
What the students say…
Abby: “I didn’t know that there was a machine that milked all the cows. I thought that they did it by hand.”Rebecca: “I thought a dairy farmer would only have about seven or eight cows, but Karol has over 100 cows.” Camilla: “I’ve learned that a lot of the cows also have their babies like humans, they also have them in nine months.”Courtney: “I didn’t know that cows could have twins. I thought they could only have one; and I got to name them, Dizzy and Daisy.”Ava: “[Calving is probably the hardest thing about being a farmer] because you don’t get any sleep and you’d be very tired and then having tons and tons of babies on your hands.”Demi: “I would love to be a farmer because I just love taking care of the animals.” 
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