Long read: Turning a golf course into a dairy farm in Co Kerry

When Padraig McCarthy returned home from Pallaskenry Agricultural College to farm with his father Edmond in 1999, they were milking 55 cows, rearing all calves to beef and growing between 15 and 20 acres of barley. The journey to date has been one of solid, steady progress, built on good technical performance and a focus on investing in productive assets.

Edmond is still working on the farm, but Padraig is calling the shots. Padraig is married to Kathryn and they have two small children, Saoirse and Cillian. Beef and tillage has been dropped, land has been purchased, cow numbers have increased to 170, and only cows and replacement heifers are kept on the block.

The McCarthy farm is not far from the village of Lixnaw in north Kerry. The area and the McCarthy farm is unique for a number of reasons. Firstly, Lixnaw is a hurling stronghold in a football county. It was the week of the county final when I visited and the whole area was decked out with green and gold – not for Kerry but for Lixnaw.

The other big difference to the rest of Kerry is that the land around Lixnaw is almost perfectly flat. It’s a complete antidote to the image of the soaring mountains and deep valleys most people have about Kerry. And while the land might be flat, it is certainly not too bad with gardens of maize peering over neighbouring hedges.

The McCarthy farm is also unique, both in terms of its scale, being nearly three times larger than the average but also because all the land is in one block. Fragmentation is a big issue around these parts, so for Padraig to come home to a 60ha block in 1999 was a great start.

Draining land

But it’s not all plain-sailing. About half of the McCarthy farm has been drained extensively over the years. About 30% of the farm is peat, after the raised bogs were cut away over the centuries. Edmond remembers well the struggles to get these sections drained in the 1980s.

The farm is only about 60ft above sea level and five miles from the sea, so getting water away is always going to be a struggle as the land is so flat. A tributary of the Brick River runs at the bottom of the farm and this has high levees at each bank to prevent a flood at high tide and sluice gates to let the water back in. It’s more like Amsterdam than Lixnaw.

The peaty ground is easily poached and while it has a good ability to recover fast, I still need to be very careful with it

“Because it’s a cutaway bog the peat is shallow, being only a foot or two deep, and under that then is grey muddy-type soil that isn’t very permeable,” Padraig explains.

A lot of the farm was drained in the 1980s. Open drains were dug around paddocks with shores installed through the field with pipes and stones. Nearly 6ha of peaty soils were reseeded this year by Padraig. While he was at it, he cleaned and deepened the perimeter drains, installed new field drains with new pipes and stone and ran a naked mole plough through the field before ploughing.

The McCarthys have their own track machine for doing the drainage work which Edmond drives. It’s their third one since the 1980s. A three-way grass seed mix was sown after the fields were drained. The varieties used were Glenroyal and Aberchoice, both diploids and both sown at 40% each and Xenon, which is a tetraploid sown at 20%.

No clover was used in the mix and Padraig said he only used Xenon as it is the tetraploid with the highest density rating.

“The peaty ground is easily poached and while it has a good ability to recover fast, I still need to be very careful with it.”

Too wet to graze

The weather caught him in the autumn as it was too wet to graze the reseeds with the dairy cows when they should have got their first grazing in September, so the calves had to graze them instead but the cleanout wasn’t as good. One of the fields was only reseeded during a dry window in September so that field won’t be grazed before next spring.

Padraig has been horsing on Ps and Ks over the past few years. Soil fertility is mixed. A lot of the farm was at index 1 and 2 a couple of years ago and while the K level is improving, with most of the farm at index 3 now, P is stagnant.

He has spread 80t of lime over the past two years. The reseeded fields got 2t/acre at the time the grass seed was sown. The peaty soils were at a pH of 5.2 a few years ago but they are up to a pH of 5.8 now, which is the target for peat soils.

Going from 55 to 172 cows didn’t happen overnight. The first stage of expansion occurred in the late 2000s when Padraig and Edmond set up a milk production partnership. This gave them access to quota and cow numbers increased to around 100 by 2010. To facilitate the increase in cow numbers, the tillage and beef enterprises were gradually phased out.

By 2012, cow numbers had increased to 123. At the time, Padraig didn’t think that he, or the farm could manage any more cows. But, four years later, he was milking 164, with 172 milked in 2017.

Part of the increase in cow numbers came about as a result of accessing extra land. A lease on 31 acres of neighbouring land began in 2012. This land, along with a further 13 acres of a former pitch and putt course and golf driving range came on the market in 2016, along with a house, some sheds and 24 acres of forestry. The McCarthys started buying.

They had a lot of work to do to get the pitch and putt course back into good grassland.

When I visited the farm back in October, the cows were grazing what was once the pitch and putt course but despite the heavy rain beforehand, there were no holes on show that day. The only remnants of golfing activities were the unusual looking shed at the driving range. While one could make references to golf ball grazing, the residuals, while good, are not so low that you would spot a golf ball from a distance. But neither is that Padraig’s aim.

Growing the business

Increasing the amount of land being farmed is one of the ways the McCarthys have grown their business. But they are also farming what they have better. Average grass growth across the farm in 2016 was 13.9t/ha. By the end of September 2017, there was 13.25t/ha grown, putting the farm on course to grow over 15t/ha for the year.

Padraig cites the decision to join the Kerry/Teagasc monitor farm programme as being the main catalyst for improvement. Ger Courtney from Teagasc got Padraig measuring grass every week and he has been doing it religiously for the past eight years. This gave Padraig knowledge – knowledge about what paddocks were performing well and what paddocks weren’t and why. He set about correcting faults, be it grass varieties, drainage or soil fertility.

Soil fertility is still a work in progress; when corrected, there is no reason why the farm won’t grow above 16t/ha. Achieving this average will probably be difficult with all the youngstock carried on the platform, but it can be done.

I think now the farm is well capable of carrying more cows, even though a few years ago I would have said that it was at its limit

Whether to offload the youngstock to a contract-rearer is the question Padraig is mulling over now. With 70 adjusted hectares all available for grazing in the block, he could carry 200 milking cows with a nitrates derogation. If he exported slurry, he could carry more cows and still comply with the derogation.

“It’s something I ask myself quite a bit. I think now the farm is well capable of carrying more cows, even though a few years ago I would have said that it was at its limit. But things adapt. I’m looking after the livestock units as it is. It just means that by getting rid of the calves and heifers I will only have one group of animals to look after,” Padraig says.

I put it to him that maybe he should rent an outfarm and put the heifers there. “That would be my least favourite option. I see lots of people driving around the country from outfarm to outfarm and it’s all time and money. I’d rather get a contract-rearer that I knew would do the job right than taking on too much myself.”

At the moment, Padraig is working full-time on the farm with Edmond helping out daily. A student from agricultural college usually comes for 12 or 16 weeks in spring and, after that, a relief milker does three evening milkings a week and every second Sunday.

Padraig takes every second Sunday off. He milks early and is finished up for 9.30am and the rest of the day is spent with the family, down at the beach if the weather is good.

Padraig’s attitude to reducing the requirement for labour is to run “a simple system with a resilient cow”. What does he mean by this?

Padraig’s view of a simple system is one revolving around grass. Cows start calving in early February and if it’s dry enough they go to grass. If it’s not dry enough, they stay in the shed eating good quality bales and nuts in the parlour. The cows were out for 278 days this year. During the summer, the decisions revolve around whether to take out surplus or put in feed depending on the wedge and when to move cows to the next paddock.

Cow type

In terms of a resilient cow, he wants a cow that will not give trouble and will have good fertility. Fertility is important for him because it means they will calve compactly, meaning lactations will be long and the average production per cow will be good because they have the days in milk. Last year, 87% calved in six weeks.

Secondly, good fertility means he will need fewer replacements, which means more land for milking cows, or less money to the contract-rearer if he goes down that road.

The herd is 35% Jersey crossbred of one degree or another. All AI was used for the past 25 years, with Jersey straws used on any black and white cows this year. The herd produced 440kg of milk solids/cow in 2016 from 400kg of meal. The herd had 318kg MS produced by the end of August this year. The herd EBI is €113.

Padraig breeds for 11 weeks in total. The first three weeks are with dairy AI, the next three weeks are with short-gestation beef AI and the final five weeks are with Aberdeen Angus stock bulls. This year, the submission rate was 89% and the empty rate was 11%, which Padraig was disappointed with as it is normally close to 6% or 7%.

Following the theme of a simple system is the farmyard. Slatted beef sheds have been converted to cubicles, giving more cow accommodation. There is currently 186 cubicles on the farm, in two roofed sheds. The weanlings are kept on slats, which then double as calf pens when the weanlings go to grass in February. The only downside of this is that the straw has to be manually cleaned out.

Parlour size

The parlour, at 14 units, is smaller than Padraig would like and milking takes longer. A new parlour on a green-field site is on the wishlist, but after only recently buying the land it may have to wait for a few years. Tacking on extra units could be a short-term measure but he’d prefer to go the whole way and do it right when he’s at it.

I look to make investments in good years, for me that’s fertiliser and reseeding

On the subject of money, Padraig has profit monitor data going back to 2008. The average net profit from 2008 to 2016 was 16.31c/l, ranging from a low of 6.91c/l in 2009 to a high of 23.48c/l in 2014. These figures don’t include debt repayments or tax, but they include one full labour unit and all the hired labour. This is clearly a profitable farm.

There are two tractors in the yard and a telehandler but all are over 10 years old and Padraig says they won’t be replaced as contractors are doing more and more of the machinery work. I asked him what he does to remain disciplined with spending money, particularly in years like this with a high milk price.

“I look to make investments in good years, for me that’s fertiliser and reseeding. This year, I’m spending more money on P and K than in other years but I expect it’ll stand to me in the future. The other thing we do is catch up on maintenance. I replaced the roof on the big cubicle shed over the summer as the old one was corroded and unsafe. I also have a sink fund or a reserve built up which should hopefully see me through the bad year.”

Padraig is a member of the AKA discussion group and is still on the monitor farm programme as a mentor farmer.

Before I left, we were talking about the milking parlour and he said that when his father built it in the 90s, his goal was to someday milk 100 cows. And while Padraig is milking 170 cows today with his sights on more, you still get the sense that the McCarthy journey was never just about cows numbers.

Padraig, like the rest of this generation, is liberated by quota removal and being able to grow cow numbers is not driven by greed but by a desire to grow as a person too. New experiences and new challenges. But the difference is on this farm it is not growth for growth’s sake, it’s measured, profitable and sustainable – on man and nature. The way it has to be.