As soon as you arrive at the Walsh family farm, you know attention to detail and cleanliness are high on the agenda.

Mix this enthusiasm to keep things right with a commercial herd focused on delivering milk solids from fertile cows and you have a good template for any farm.

In 2016, 104 cows were milked producing 580,000 litres of milk on a grazing platform of 53ha with 92ha farmed in total.

This year, cow numbers have increased to 110 cows and John and his son Brendan have plans for further investment in winter housing that will allow for further herd expansion, with an initial plan for 150 cows.

Like all successful family dairy enterprises, it takes plenty of help to keep the farm clean and up to the mark on recordkeeping alongside the daily milking routine.

Helena, Clare, Ann, Maria and Andrew Myles all help in various ways on this south Tipperary farm. As judges, we have visited quality milk farms in the past when one person was in charge of everything for the simple reason that nobody else could do it good enough. In the long term when the workload is shared and the standard remains high, it’s a much more sustainable setup.

Like some of the other quality milk finalists, John is trialling using teat sealers only on young cows that have had a clean first lactation in a bid to reduce antibiotic usage during the dry period.

Like a lot of farmers, he is using a watching brief to see what results will be like. There is one school of thought which suggests that reducing antibiotic usage during the dry period is good but the other side of the story is that the dry period is the best time for effective use of antibiotics.

There is no doubt about it but you need excellent long- and short-term recordkeeping on individual cows, clean application of sealers when inserting and clean cubicles during the winter housing period.

It’s a while since pedigree Charolais cattle roamed the lands at Ballylomasna but the progress made so far with the black and white cattle shows this farm hasn’t been standing still.

John's calf shed.

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