We are doing ‘bull beef’ for the first time this year which means that there are 44 large and raucous bulls rather than steers in 2 sheds up the yard!
Why? Well, it should be more profitable. We have kept the occasional bull calf ‘whole’ in the past to ‘clean’ up the occasional cow or heifer that may not have gone into calf via Artificial Insemination and they always killed out an average of ?250 higher than steers. The disadvantage, of [...]
The theme for Blog Action Day is Food and the hashtag is #bad11.
As dairy and beef farmers within the EU, we have to ensure traceability of our beef (as to sheep farmers etc too) and while there has been an emphasis in recent years for restaurants to show that they are buying Irish and buying local, sometimes I think it just doesn’t go far enough. We seem to want food to be cheaper and cheaper all the time, [...]
When Brian told me yesterday that I was in the Farmer’s Journal, I was somewhat surprised. I was featured in the Irish Country Living part of it over 3 years ago and it gave my business great profile. I’ve been hoping to be featured again as the business has changed so much but it seems to be a case of if you have been featured once, that is it! They have occasionally featured my products in their new seasonal glossy [...]
Our dog went missing one afternoon this week. He is usually with Brian on the tractor or working the cattle. If not, he is put into his kennel but as he is becoming more mature, we have become more lax about trusting him to stay around if Brian is away. Last Sunday, when Brian was driving to the outfarm, he was astounded to see him along the main road, got him into the car and gave him a good telling [...]
We’re trying to get quite a bit of re-seeding done this year, having been scuppered in our attempts with all the rain in previous summers. It was very hard to get anything more than one or two fields done each year. However, with the re-seeding comes the picking of stones so on Friday afternoon we all got stuck in!
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