I’m happy to report that Liam McCarthy has settled well in his new home for the next 12 months and I’ve heard he’s happy to stay for longer.

The first part of September wasn’t overly productive on the farm, with celebrating Galway’s win and the incredibly broken weather, but we have battled the storm and are back into the swing of things.

I farm at home with my father along the banks of the River Shannon where we keep a 500-ewe flock and also keep beef cattle.

I rear Friesian bull calves too just to keep us on our toes. I’ve been at home more or less full-time since 2012 after I completed the Green Cert in Gurteen College in Tipperary.

I was always destined to stay home with my father, but I didn’t rush into it nor was I forced. I was allowed a grace period after school to see what went on outside of east Galway.

I milked cows and worked with contractors in NZ and I gave a summer honing my mortar mixing skills and playing a bit of hurling in Chicago.

I’m fierce glad my parents went along with this, as I think every young farmer should go off and see what goes on outside of your own gate, be it working for other farmers in your area or even overseas if possible. Life doesn’t be long catching up on you, so take the opportunities when you can.

Get the fert out of here

Back to the farming side of things, we’re making up for lost time this week as we spread the last of the fertiliser before the closed period, following the fertiliser plan that was drawn up with my Knowledge Transfer facilitator.

We have a good cover of grass on the farm as it stands, so this will drive it on and prolong keeping sheep and young cattle out for as long as possible.

We also have some muriate of potash to spread later on in the autumn, as this can be spread during the closed period. I plan to soil-sample the whole farm later in the year, as we will need our P, K and pH levels to be spot on to grow more grass for our new venture.

But that’s for another day.

Lamb draft is running ahead of last year, but that wouldn’t be hard

We also got around to giving the ewes the annual NCT. We don’t let rams off until the end of October, so there was no panic on this job, ewes have been living the high life since weaning, enjoying the views of the Shannon as they regained some condition post-weaning.

Weaning 1.65 lambs per ewe including ewe lambs, the rest was well merited.

The benefits of culling hard the last few years and replacing with homebred ewe lambs and a few well-bred mule hoggets is beginning to pay off, as we only had 10% culls – this would be less than half of other years.

Grass is plentiful, so these culls will run around after lambs and clean out some fields.

Making the draft

Lamb draft is running ahead of last year, but that wouldn’t be hard.

We have about 35% of our lambs gone at this stage, but this will be close to 50% in about three weeks, as I have a large group of lambs on Redstart that are flying it, doing about 2kg/week.

The Redstart was sown on 17 May and we started grazing on 7 July as lambs were weaned at about 14 weeks.

It’s been a good success, but wasn’t without its teething issues, as it’s the first time we have used it.

We were probably a bit late bolusing the lambs going on to it and we had some issues with scabby ears and general discomfort with some lambs.

They need iodine when grazing these crops and the bolus took a while to activate.

We were more on the ball since and had no issues with later lambs that were added.

We just started the third round of grazing on the crop, so time will tell if we get a fourth.

Up next on the farm we have bullocks coming fit for slaughter.

We hope to get as many gone as possible while grass is plentiful and ground conditions are good.

I’ll be changing our usual plan of replacing these with bull weanlings. Instead, we will be opting for a different form of bovine.

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