Farmer Focus: Shane Crean - his path to change

To change the way you farm takes self-awareness, courage and time. For the Crean family, the change process in their farming system took almost 10 years to complete. In 2004, Shane and his parents, John and Diana, were milking 230 cows on two platforms on the outskirts of Tralee, Co Kerry, supplying Lee Strand Co-op.

Stocking rate on both farms was over seven cows per hectare. The herd was split-calving, with high-yielding Holstein Friesians.

As Shane says, the feed lorries were coming in, the slurry tankers were going out and the diet feeder was going all day, every day, mixing rations.

During spring and summer, the cows used to graze a 20th of the farm per day, regardless of the pre-grazing yield. Grass was a very small proportion of the diet.

“We knew the system wasn’t sustainable. Infertility was being masked by transferring cows from one calving season to the next. The milking platforms were too small for the number of cows we wanted to milk. It was very labour-intensive and hard on both ourselves and the cows,” Shane says.

The vision was to milk all the cows in one large spring-calving block, which would be more profitable and more sustainable.

In 1999, they purchased an 88ha tillage farm in Doneraile, Co Cork. For the first couple of years, this farm was used to rear young stock.

In 2004, work began on constructing a 50-point rotary parlour, a cubicle shed for 250 cows and laying out the farm with paddocks, roadways and water.

The plan was that Shane and all the cows would move to Cork and all the young stock would stay in Kerry to be managed by John and Diana.

When the cows moved up from Kerry in 2005, herd EBI was €-6. Average fat was 3.6% and average protein was 3.3%. These were 8,000-litre cows that were not used to grazing grass and Shane was not used to managing grass.

The plan

Having spent time in New Zealand and after seeing what other successful farmers were doing, Shane quickly realised that the genetics of his herd had to change fast.

Having spent years breeding for high-volume yields, they switched to breeding for high fat, protein and good fertility. They started using Jersey sires in 2008.

“I believe the Jersey cross cow is more robust and more profitable, especially as herds get bigger. Today, over 80% of the herd is Jersey crossbred. We now have Friesians out of crossbred cows and some of the heifers are Norwegian Red out of crossbred cows,” he says.

Herd EBI has improved dramatically. The farm went all spring-calving in 2013 – removing the temptation to swing cows over that didn’t go in calf from season to season.

The EBI is now €135, with €53 for milk sub index and €55 for fertility. Yes, the herd is still only at national average levels in terms of genetic quality, but we must remember that the herd had a minus EBI in 2003.

The gain has been substantial at over €14 per year in herd EBI, especially considering the expansion in cow numbers also.

Most of the bulls used by Shane have been daughter-proven.

Shane expects to have over 80% of the herd calved in six weeks this spring. He says it is an area that still needs improvement.

With over 300 cows milking, each 1% change in six-week calving rate is worth €2,700 on his farm. His target is to get to 90% calving in six weeks.

The herd sold 400kg of milk solids this year from mostly grazed grass and 500kg of meal fed.

Of course, breeding and genetics are only part of the Crean success story. Shane has gone from growing 8t/ha of grass in 2006 to 16t/ha in 2015.