The health plan on Tullamore Farm is an important part of the farm plan. You could have everything else right on a farm and if health goes wrong, you are back to square one.

On Tullamore Farm, labour also plays a factor when it comes to spending money on the health plan. We manage an 85-cow suckler herd and a 250-ewe flock, so we try to avoid any serious health breakdowns like scour or pneumonia. A disease outbreak is a major drag on labour - treating and tending to sick animals - so we have adopted a prevention is better than cure ethos when formulating the health programme on the farm.

Table 1 and Table 2 (see below) outline the beef and sheep costs on the farm. Vaccines feature heavily in both programmes with over €4,000 being spent on vaccines in the suckler herd.

This is a combination of BVD, Leptospirosis and scour vaccine being administered to the cows along with clostridial and pneumonia vaccines being given to the calves. Vaccines make up 36% of the bill on the suckler side.

Dosing products

The next highest cost is dosing products at €1,689 or 15% of the total suckler bill. TB testing is costing the farm €1,057 annually.

On the sheep side, vaccinations are also the highest cost coming in at €1,868 with fly treatments and foot bathing coming in at €1,098 for the farm in 2023.

Health costs have risen from €100/cow in 2021 to €134/cow in 2023 while ewe health costs have risen from €14/ewe in 2021 to €25/ewe in 2023.

The farm made an investment in heat detection and health monitoring collars in 2024 to aid the increase in sexed semen use on the farm and move to 100% AI. This came at a substantial upfront cost of €16,849. When the TAMS grant is claimed the collars will work out at €26/cow/year over five years. So far, we are happy with how the collars have worked on the farm with the herd due to be scanned in two weeks' time.