Brothers Danny and Patrick Cremin are milking on two milking blocks in mid-Limerick. The business is a real family farm with parents, partners and nephews all involved.
Brothers Danny and Patrick Cremin are milking on two milking blocks in mid-Limerick. The business is a real family farm with parents, partners and nephews all involved.
The Ballyagran Farm was developed from a support block to the home farm to a milking block in its own right in 2015 and the pair are milking 220 cows there now.
The Cremin brothers aim to run a low cost, grass-based system with high levels of grass utilisation per hectare.
Danny reeled off the key performance indicators to the judges; they aim to grow 13t DM/ha, apply 200kg N/ha, feed around 700kg of meal per cow and have a stocking rate of three cows/ha on the milking block and 2.4 cows/ha overall.
The herd of Jersey crossbred cows typically produce 460kg to 480kg MS/cow annually.
The EBI of the herd is €226 and Danny says they pick the best 100 cows on EBI and they get sexed dairy semen with the remainder getting beef AI straws.
He says that they have used Belgian Blue AI straws in the past but have found them sometimes slow to move so are now using more Charlaois and Angus beef sires.
The dairy bull team this year consisted of three Jersey crossbred bulls and three Holstein Friesian bulls. They keep the bull calves on the farm for three to four weeks before selling them so have a strong calf to sell.
The pair invested significantly in infrastructure on the farm since they converted it to dairy, with a view to reducing the environmental footprint of the farm. The cubicle shed has been roofed and cow walking areas have been concreted.
A small stream, a tributary of the Maigue River runs very close to the calf sheds so these sheds have recently been re-floored and new drainage channels installed.
The bridge crossing the stream where the cows enter the yard has also been resurfaced with kerbs erected to keep run-off out of the river and drainage channels taking any run-off to a nearby tank.
Clover is a big part of this farm with the Cremins working to get more clover established. They over-sowed ten acres with clover this year but Danny admits it’s a work in progress.
When the judges visited the Ballyagran farm in early July the brothers were applying 19 units/acre of protected urea on the grass only swards and 10 to 12 units/acre of protected urea on the clover swards.
The brothers are also applying soiled water on the clover paddocks and making better use of slurry in springtime.
The farm was converted to dairy in 2015 and there has been a big focus on improving soil fertility and improving grass varieties and clover contents.The herd delivers between 460kg and 480kg MS/cow each year and the farm grows over 13t annually. The EBI of the herd is €226 and only the best cows are used to breed replacements with everything else getting beef bulls. 
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