More than 300 farmers attended the recent open day at Galtee View Farm. Producers were eager to learn how labour efficiency, selecting the right cows for the system, continuous herd improvement, and strategies to de-stress the business and improve lifestyle have helped Simon and Carol, along with parents Peter and Sheila, run one of the most efficient units in the area.
The total area farmed is 115ha with a milking platform of 89ha, a milking platform stocking rate of 2.92 cows/ha and an overall stocking rate of 2.26 cows/ha.
Included in this total area are two other farms, one located five miles away and the other three miles away, both used for silage production. All calves are reared off the farm on a rented block, with the one and two-year-old heifers contract reared by Eamonn and Mary Callanan. The heifers return to Simon in-calf, and those not in-calf are sent straight off to market to be sold.
Simon aims to get the herd up to 4.5 lactations/cow, at the moment he’s at 3.7. As the trade for in-calf heifers was poor last autumn, he kept all these heifers and pushed out some of the older ones. “I’m not trying to keep the herd young, but I had to move the older cows out or I was virtually giving away very good high genetic heifers,” he says. The herd grew by 11 extra cows in 2024 as a result.
The family are very aware of how difficult it is to keep staff, so they aim for a real team spirit culture on the farm. Other part-time members include Kenneth Purcell, Paddy Walsh and Conor Burke, with Simon keen to give anyone a chance if they work hard and do their best.
“I’ve looked at rearing the heifers myself again on one of the out farms, but then Eamonn and Mary are doing a really good job and provide both land and labour. The possibility of losing the nitrates derogation is also a consideration. When you have a good team, as we have here, you need to keep hold of them. I have loads of different people and contractors doing different jobs, it’s a bit like a jigsaw, and I have to pull it all together!”
Simon hasn’t looked back since crossbreeding his herd
Simon is involved in what he describes as some very progressive discussion groups, a local Emly/Tipperary group, a low-carbon dairy farm group and the DairyMis group based out of Moorepark. It was here, where a lot of positive results were coming from trials on crossbreeding, that he decided to move forward in this direction with his herd.
The first cows Simon worked with were black and white, with a lot of Holstein blood. He started to use some New Zealand Friesians, then moved towards Jerseys. “The larger type of cow just wasn’t suiting our system,” he says
When he started with the Jerseys, Simon was worried about keeping the calves alive as they were so small, but soon found out they were easier to rear than the Friesians
“I liked what I saw when the first heifers came into the herd, the solids were going through the roof. On advice from LIC/Eurogene, we started using KiwiCross® bulls on the crossbred cows and later moved to sexed semen. Since then, we haven’t looked back.”
He uses Belgian Blue bulls to produce his beef calves and has a local purchaser who buys them all. “He took 125 calves in one day last year!”
All was going well at the Emly unit with Simon’s herd earning a five-star ranking on fat, protein, milk price, 6-week submission rate and EBI. The empty weight across the herd was less than 10% consistently, and with cow weight of around 487 kg, herd efficiency was sitting at around 1 kgMS per kg of liveweight.
The spring calving unit had 93% of cows calving in a six-week window. Producing 449 kgMS/cow, feeding just 540 kg/meal per cow meal at 4.93% fat and 3.84% protein (2023).
Outstanding fertility and repro success despite disease outbreak
But in spring 2023 his herd were hit with an outbreak of pastuerella multocida pneumonia, an unusual illness in dairy cows, and one more often seen in young beef animals. The cause of the outbreak remains a mystery, but more than 50 cows were treated in February and early March and the herd seemed to recover well.
“The vaccine is very expensive and, as no other cows were sick after the spring outbreak, we decided with the vet not to vaccinate” remembers Simon. “There were no problems in spring 2024 but then at the end of May cows started to show signs of being sick again – recording very high temperatures. So, we decided to vaccinate the whole herd,” he says. No animals died, but fertility was affected with some cows losing embryos.
However, overall fertility and reproductive performance is excellent, despite the disease outbreak, and this spring the six-week calving rate was 95% and the three-week submission rate was 97%. After 10 weeks of breeding with AI, only 10% of the cows scanned empty.
Today Simon only breeds for 10 weeks (rather than 12) as he says the cows coming into the herd have good genetics for fertility. In addition, he puts any late-calving cows on to once-a-day milking until they’re bred.
He aims for 70 heifer replacements; 50 replacements are kept, with 20 sold.
“My discussion group told me I should keep rearing this number of heifers as, although the price might not be right now, in time the trade should improve!”
Weathering the storm together
The weather has had a big impact on Galtee View Farm in the past 12 months. “It started raining here in July last year and it didn’t stop.
“By April 1st this year I’ll never forget how fed up I felt. It was a bank holiday and everyone else was off for the weekend. The weather here was atrocious. The grass quality was atrocious. The cows were inside. I’d just had enough.
“I started to ring a few friends of mine for a bit of a chat, bit of a morale boost. I could see how fellas got depressed. I just needed to talk to someone. And these guys were in the very same situation as I was. One chap said I was the second person to ring him that day and admitted he had rung a friend of his earlier in the morning for the same reason, he needed a bit of a blowout.
“But then the weather improves, and we can get back to work. All farmers love their jobs, but sometimes it’s really hard work. When the weather is bad you see that there’s so much work you want to get on with, but you can’t. That’s when the frustration steps in.”
Now Simon feels that he is at a crossroads. He’s unsure whether he will be allowed to maintain current cow numbers (nitrates derogation) or if he will be forced into a lower stocking rate. Either way, he plans to focus on increasing milk solids rather than volume.
“Farming is tough, sometimes it’s difficult to know which way to turn. “But I love the job, and would never do anything else,” he adds.
