Farm Focus: Meet one of this year’s four family farms - Kilkenny Farming

Teagasc’s Monitor Farm programme is running again, this year, in the Kilkenny/ Waterford region and one of the family farms taking part is that of the Fitzgerald family near Portlaw in Co Waterford.

Shane is farming with his wife Kate and his dad John. They also have a 12 week placement agricultural student called Charlotte this year. 
They are over 70% the way through calving their dairy herd and everything has gone well.

This is the second year of their new calf house and it is working out very well.
Kate is the main person working in the calf shed and hygiene is the number one priority. There are disinfection points at all entrances and exits to the shed. This is very important and they are changed regularly to ensure no unwanted diseases get a chance to establish in the calf sheds.

Kate has a great set up with pens for 5-6 calves and once they are trained there they move onto the larger pens.
There are no individual pens as Kate says they take a lot of time to look after a calf in and to clean out. She said it is as easy to stand and help 4/5 calves onto the feeder as one.

Some of the Friesian bulls calves have already been sold off the farm and another lot were due to go.
These long standing arrangements with clients of the Fitzgerald’s are important as they come back every year to buy their Fr bull calves and their dairy beef calves.

Picking the right DBI bulls for their cows means a quality calf that has not caused any calving difficulties for the cow and leaves a quality calf for sale.
With these calves gone there was plenty of room left in the shed for the remaining calves for March.

The next area to see progress was out in the paddocks.
The farm has over 15% grazed in what was a tricky month of February.
As Shane explained it was easier in early February to get cows out as weather conditions were good but grazing power was low as so few had calved.

As the numbers grew the weather started to turn so Shane resorted to on/off grazing for two to three hours.
This meant a short standoff of cows after milking in the cubicle shed and then out to grass.

Shane has access to a good few paddocks around the shed so it did not take long to get cows out or back in.
The hard work setting up correct allocation with reels and pigtails was already done so it was literally cows out to graze and when the time was up they were brought back in.

Key to getting this good graze out is the correct allocation and as Shane said some days you get it right and others you don’t but the overriding factor is that you are getting grass into the cows and that is what they need and you see the results of your work in the bulk tank!
The Fitzgeralds are one of Teagasc’s four monitor farmers in the Waterford/ Kilkenny region.