Michael & Alex McCarthy Farm Update

June 2022

We are farming in a partnership milking 170 cows on a grass based system. We farm 104 hectares. A major challenge we see coming at us over the next couple of years are the environmental challenges. We want to increase biodiversity on our farm and have incorporated another 400 meters of hedgerow on the farm. We have been doing this over the last number of years. Last year we put in about one kilometre of hedgerow.

For the last month we have been breeding, reseeding and cutting silage. This is our fourth week of breeding and we are very happy at the way it went so far. We reseeded 2.5 hectares reseeded and we plan on taking out another 2 hectares next week. We are sorry we didn’t take it out earlier as grass growth has been excellent for the last few weeks. We included 2 kgs of clover in all of our new reseeds. We broadcast and stitched in clover last year and we are seeing the benefits of doing it now. The first cut of 85 acres was taken out at the weekend and we are spreading slurry this week. The slurry will be tested as well.

Over the next month on the farm we will be preparing for the NDC walk on June 15. We put in a new milking parlour and it is nearly up and running at this stage. We plan to spread lime over the summer as well as we have a few paddocks that need to be rectified.