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I farm: “Twenty pedigree Suffolk ewes and 60 commercial Suffolk-Blue Leicester crosses on 42ac alongside my wife Mary and sons Seán and Seamus. We got rid of a lot of older pedigree ewes this year and have 23 hoggets coming on.”
Lambing: “The pedigrees are lambing at the moment and they’ll all be done this month. They’re indoors with the weather, on meal and hay. We haven’t had many problems so far, just the one section, but you’d be 24/7 watching them. We’re finding the lambs very robust this year. We have a few recipient ewes with pedigree lambs as well. The pedigrees were all AI’d and we’ve been doing it a good many years. We have them lambing now to have a few ready for the premier sale in Blessington, the first Saturday of August.”
Commercial: “The commercial ewes are due the last week of February. We scanned them two weeks ago and there were no empties in them, a lot of triplets. The speckled ewes are put back to the Suffolk and the black ones go to the Leicester. We sell the ewe lambs to different farmers off-farm and the ram lambs are finished and sold to Irish Country Meats, Camolin. You wouldn’t like to have hoggets for sale at the moment. The price of lamb is gone very poor.”
Inputs: “The cost of meal is definitely mind-boggling at the moment. The cost of everything, all inputs, has gone up. We didn’t do that ACRES, we wouldn’t have the acreage for it.”
Society: “We first started our Barrowlands Flock in 1994. We always had the Tullow-type ewe or Cheviot ewes, used Suffolk rams and bred our own replacements. We’ve been involved in the south of Ireland branch of the Suffolk Sheep Society for a long time and my wife Mary is honorary secretary. There’s a great social element to it. We’d be at the Ploughing and Tullamore Show with the sheep. I do a bit of judging here and up north too. There’s great demand for the Irish Suffolk and we’ve exported them to Germany, France and Belgium.”
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