Visiting there recently, Peter Burke met the Mulligan family, running a herd of 740 cows – big for the Emerald Isle.
Located near the city of Sligo, in northwest Ireland, the Mulligans’ farm is just half a kilometre from the beautiful rugged coastline.
Their land is fertile and the country gently rolling – ideal for dairying. Dry stone walls are a feature of all the farms. This is typically beautiful Irish countryside with a slice of ruggedness making it even more attractive.
Today the farm covers just over 350ha, about half of it owned by the Mulligans and the remainder leased. Rainfall is about 1000mm, normal for this region with its exposure to Atlantic gales.
Padraig senior has worked on the farm since he was 14 when it was a 5.6ha mixed farm with three cows, 14 ewes, two sows and a horse for ploughing and carting of hay. It was essentially self-sufficient.
When he took over the farm in 1972 it had grown to 16ha and ran 55 cows. One year later he and wife Mary married and returned from their honeymoon to a disaster.
“When we came back the whole herd had gone down with brucellosis. I had to start again and that was pretty hard. My wife went back to working in the bank and there were a few pounds coming in every week, and we started doing B&B to help the finances.
“We have moved on from those bad days, rebuilt the herd and bought about 20 small farms and some machinery and for a while did contracting,” he says.
The game-changer was son Padraig’s decision to return home to help his father run the farm. Since then, they developed what could be called an Irish-cross cow – part Jersey and part Holstein. This has produced a smaller cow with good milk production but higher milk solids – similar to the NZ Kiwi-cross.
Mulligan is aware NZ farmers feed out a lot of supplements, but his philosophy is to use grass to the fullest, cut back the use of meal and use baleage and hay only when necessary. At present, stocking rate on the farm is 6.4su/ha – double the national average.
Since Padraig Og (Irish for junior) returned to the farm the expansion has speeded up and it’s reached the stage where the present milking parlour is too small.
Planning to expand, four years ago they formed a company with him and his parents as directors. The two Padraigs do the farm work, and Mary looks after the finances and paperwork.
With production at least 400,000kgMS/year from 740 cows, the Mulligans decided two years ago to bite the bullet, making plans to install a 70-bail Dairymaster Rotary at a cost of about NZ$1.3 million.
Padraig Og says they looked at whether to install a smaller rotary, but other large dairy farmers advisied them to go big. Now most of the earthworks for the new parlour are completed and the aim is to have the shed running late this year.
“The parlour, although large, will be quite basic -- the usual automatic cup removers, teat spray, automatic drafting and a back-end scraper. We chose Dairymaster because they were Irish and we could get a part quickly; after-sales service is very important.
“With this parlour two people will be able to milk 500 cows an hour. In the present parlour, morning milking can take up to five hours and the evening four hours, so there will be savings in the cost of labour.”
The Mulligan family are confident their decision to grow the business will pay off long term. They are banking on dairying becoming an even bigger part of the Irish economy.
