Grassland Farmer of the Year: meet the finalists

The Grassland Farmer of the Year competition is part of the Grass 10 programme. The purpose of the competition is to reward farmers for achieving excellence in grassland management.

Finalists are selected from a number of categories: dairy, beef, sheep, heavy soils and young farmer.

Farms are selected for a visit by the judges based on total tonnage grown per hectare, number of grazings and number of grass measures.

The judges for 2020 represent the Grass 10 programme sponsors. These are Liz Hyland of the Department of Agriculture; John Maher of Teagasc; Ciaran Roche of FBD Insurance; Bryan Doocey of AIB; PJ O’Connor of Grassland Agro and Aidan Brennanof the Irish Farmers Journal.

Criteria

The judges rank the farms on a number of criteria: grassland management, sustainability, soil fertility, grazing infrastructure and reseeding policy.

Six finalists have already been featured. This week, we profile another three contestants.

Rathduff, Co Cork

In 2018, former engineering student John O’Connell returned to Ireland after spending five years working on and managing a large dairy farm in New Zealand.

In December 2018, he took up employment as farm manager on Hilltop Farm at Rathduff near Mallow in Co Cork. The 72ha milking block of dry, free-draining land is usually home to a herd of 200 dairy cows, but a TB outbreak has temporally reduced numbers this autumn.

The farm that John manages is a leased farm and John is responsible for all management decisions regarding the herd and grassland management.

Performance is excellent, with the farm growing 15.8t DM/ha in 2019, achieving 9.2 grazings per paddock on average and John recording a total of 53 measurements.

Not only that, but the herd of Jersey crossbred and Holstein Frieisan cows sold 518kg MS/cow in 2019 from about 850kg of meal per cow. Meal feeding in 2020 will be back to about 500kg per cow, as there are fewer cows on the farm than last year.

John is a contestant in the young farmer category. He runs the farm more or less on his own, but has part-time help in the spring and relief milkers for the rest of the year. Facilities on the farm are excellent, with 230 cubicles and a new 20-unit parlour.

Contractors do almost all of the tractor work, with the exception of fertiliser spreading.

At this stage, 70% of the farm has been reseeded over the last four or five years or so, using mostly Abergain and Aberchoice grass varieties.

Soil type is dry, but the farm is exposed and east winds can reduce growth rates in late spring. Most of the farm is at soil index 3 and 4 for phosphorus and potash.

The whole farm gets one bag/acre of 18:6:12+S in early spring and any low-index fields are targeted with extra slurry. John spread just shy of 250kg N/ha in 2020.

John hopes that the milking platform will be back up to 200 cows in 2021, which will be a stocking rate of 2.77 cows/ha. His target opening cover is 900kg/ha on 1 February, so he needs to have an average farm cover of 750kg/ha by 1 December. Last winter, the farm grew 300kg/ha over the winter.

In terms of making the farm more sustainable over the coming years, John plans to oversow clover, use more protected urea, plant another 250m of hedgerows and plant more trees on the farm as well as further reduce meal feeding rates.

John says the Irish springs are a lot harder to manage than a New Zealand spring, as the weather is usually much better in New Zealand.

Kildorrery, Co Cork

Originally from Kilbrittain in west Cork, Noel Hurley moved to Mallow in the early 1990s to manage a farm. Through leasing, land purchase and hard work, he has built up his own farm and is milking 165 cows in 2020 with plans to go to 200 next year.

The home farm is near Farrahy, nestled between Bowen’s Court and the Ballyhoura Mountains. Noel was working for Munster Bovine up to 2015, looking after DIY milk recording.

“I used to be driving around to farms dropping off the milk meters and you could see the difference in grass quality between the farmers who were measuring grass and those who weren’t, so I knew that this was something I needed to do,” Noel says.

After becoming a full-time farmer, Noel joined the local grass measuring group, which he says has been a huge help to him. The farm grew 16.9t DM/ha in 2019 and Noel achieved 9.5 grazings per paddock on average. He walked the farm 34 times in 2019. So far this year, he has grown over 15t DM/ha.

One of his biggest achievements in terms of grassland management has been his ability to reduce his reliance on chemical nitrogen. He spread 230t of lime across the 93ha farm in 2018 along with 6t of MOP in 2019. Improving soil fertility has led to a reduction in chemical nitrogen usage.

“We spread 27:2.4:4.5+S fertiliser for most of the year because I want to drip-feed phosphorus. Total fertiliser usage has gone way down over the last few years. We spread exactly 200kg N/ha on the milking block this year. My fertiliser bill is now around €25,000 per year, whereas a few years ago it was around €45,000 per year. One fill of the fertiliser spreader used to cover nine acres; now we get 16 or 17 acres out of each fill.”

Clover was sown in all grass seed mixtures, but a combination of historically high nitrogen usage and weed control meant that most of the clover did not survive.

This is something that Noel is hoping to rectify in the coming years by minding clover better.

The herd of Holstein Friesian cows are high yielding, selling 520kg MS/cow in 2019 from over 900kg of meal per cow. The herd EBI is €115.

Noel targets an opening average farm cover of 1,000kg/ha in spring.

Clonmel, Co Tipperary

Graham Swanton has been the farm manager at Miletree Farm, just outside Clonmel, Co Tipperary, since 2007.

Miletree Farm is the main farm in a large dairy business which supports five families, excluding landowners.

There are 144ha in Miletree and 510 cows were milked in 2020, giving a milking platform stocking rate of 3.54 cows/ha. Youngstock and silage are grown on outside blocks.

Despite running a very large business, attention to detail and performance is very high. The farm grew 16.1t DM/ha in 2019.

Graham achieved an average of 9.6 grazings per paddock and walked the farm 40 times. The herd of mostly Jersey crossbred cows sold 470kg MS/cow last year from around 900kg of meal.

Breeding policy has changed on the farm in recent years, with only Holstein Friesian bulls being used now and only enough to generate sufficient dairy replacements, followed by Hereford AI.

Extra calf sheds have been built to handle calves and Graham says there is now capacity to house over 700 calves on the farm.

Up to a few years ago fodder, beet used to be grown and grazed in-situ, but this has since ceased and all the farm is now in grass to make it simpler to run.

When the judges visited in early October, the herd was producing 1.65kg MS/cow while on grass full-time and 4kg of meal.

Graham says he prefers to do things in blocks rather than swopping and changing daily.

So if silage needs to be fed, he will prefer to feed it in one block, perhaps housing some of the cows full-time rather than giving a small bit of silage to all the cows. He says that this makes decision-making easier as everyone on the farm knows what’s happening and contractors can be arranged for feeding, etc.

Two hundred tonnes of lime is bought annually and spread on the lowest-pH 100 acres across the farms.

He spread 180kg N/ha across the whole farm in 2020, with 250kg N/ha spread on the milking block. He reckons about 50% of the farm has good clover establishment. He scores the farm for clover content in autumn and will then target the low fields for over-sowing next year.

Graham has worked out that 8.8% of the milking platform is habitat area, including hedgerows and forestry ground.