Tom Bolger is the BETTER beef farmer featured in this week’s Irish Farmers Journal.

Alongside his son Ian, he keeps 48 sucklers on a relatively free-draining farm near Borris, Co Carlow.

The herd calves in the springtime, from mid-February. There is also an 80-ewe sheep flock on the farm, which lambs in March.

Tom’s son Ian is an engineer and Tom himself is also a competent craftsperson. The pair have placed a big emphasis on farm safety, using some of their own skills in the process.

“Our farm is split by a main road with no hard shoulder or grassy verge. There are 5ft hedges either side so pulling out on to the road in a tractor can be a nightmare – you’re so far away from the front of the machine and can’t see the traffic.

‘‘I used to have to get down from the cab, run out on to the road to check if the coast was clear, then quickly jump back into the cab. To overcome this, we fitted a pair of angled mirrors to the front of the bonnet and they’ve been a brilliant addition,” Tom said.

De-horning crate

“We found that many of the de-horning crates on the market weren’t suitable where there were varying sizes of calves and often needed two people to operate. Also, letting the calf out of a crate backwards is stressful for both man and beast and you risk opening up a scab if it catches the crate on the way out.”

“We came up with a design that narrows at the back and can be adjusted so that big and small calves can be worked. Our crate also lets animals out the front gate and has ‘‘wheelbarrow’’ arms and wheels so it doesn’t have to be lugged around the yard,” Tom told me.

Calving gates

“The calving gates here are very simple, but mirror what you’d get on the market.

The only difference really is that our C-section gate is detachable and fits on to the structure as you need it.

We have adjustable head-locking gates which are operated via a rope. This means you can lock a cow in safely from behind her.

One calving gate will serve the pens either side of it. We recently removed a bar that could potentially choke an animal if she went down,” Tom told me.