IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT TWO
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF WENT TO A LAMBING SHED IN ENNISKERRY TO MEET MICHAEL KEEGAN, A SHEEP FARMER WHOSE WATERFALL FARM IS HOME TO A FLOCK OF WELSH LLEYNS – THE BREED OF THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO THEIR OWNER
FIVE mothers, 15 offspring. Some members of Michael Keegan’s flock are very productive indeed and this pen- full of triplets romping around is no great cause for remark.
The past few weeks have been a very busy time indeed for Michael as he plots his quiet revolution in Irish sheep farming by promoting a breed called lleyn, which originates in Wales but appears to be very much at home in County Wicklow.
Lambing means that his big shed on the Keegan holding in the hills above Enniskerry has been converted into a giant maternity ward.
Not every birth is guaranteed to go well and there are always still-born or premature casualties, despite his rubber gloved assistance.
‘ They are not going to make it,’ he predicts as one mother, her rear end still bloodied after delivery, licks listlessly at a pair of unresponsive twins which arrived too early. ‘ There is no point getting overly emotional. There’s no room for sentiment.’
Instead of wasting nervous energy on soppy feelings, he prefers to exercise his mind with the mathematics of his enterprise on the uplands close to the famous Powerscourt waterfall.
It should all ideally boil down to the figure 2, or maybe a tiny fraction above that. Two is the number of lambs which the average ewe involved in this enterprise is expected to produce each year.
The maths dictate that triplets and the occasional set of quads are no novelty where the two target is being achieved, along with a few blanks and plenty of singles.
The Keegans have been here since the 1700s when Michael’s forebears took up a tenancy on the Powerscourt estate, some time in the wake of Cromwell’s eventful visit to Ireland in 1649.
His late grandfather Charlie Keegan remains a legendary figure in Irish agriculture, the first world champion ploughman produced by this country, winning the title in Austria in 1964.
Michael’s father Alan died in February of 1999, his demise in his mid-forties hastened by exposure to organophosphates, the sheep dipping chemicals which wreaked havoc with so many farming lives.
Michael was aged just 18 at the time if his parent’s death, then a student working towards his ‘green cert’ at Gurteen agricultural college in Tipperary.
Although Charlie was still alive and available to offer advice, the young man soon found himself calling the shots on the 100 acre holding which is supplemented by rented hill pasture, bringing the total up close to the 200 acre mark. It is enough to sustain more than 300 ewes.
He remains grateful to the neighbours who helped out at the time of his father’s passing when the pain of grief was mixed with the craziness of the lambing season.
He resides here with his wife Hannah and their daughter Nelly, with another child due shortly, while his mother Liz is also still very much in residence in the old farmhouse.
The man in charge at Waterfall Farm is proud to be part of something which has lasted centu- ries though he is not stuck in the mud of Keegan heritage and his is very much a modern business.
‘It is a family farm but I am the only one farming,’ he says, determined not only to carry on a tradition but also to make a decent living from the flock.
They grew some cereals back the day but, as Michael so bluntly puts it: ‘ The arse fell out of tillage.’ Now the only tillage undertaken is a crop of turnips grown to feed the sheep, keeping down the bill for costly bought feed. The aim is to be as self-sufficient as possible.
‘I grew up sheep farming but we had cattle and poultry too – 1,700 hens at one stage,’
The suckler cows, the barley and the hens have all gone to leave the fields free for Michael’s grand project, part of a movement which aims to change the face of the sheep industry in Ireland.
A man on a galloping horse might not notice but the rams, ewes and lambs here are not of the usual stock common in Irish fields.
With their white faces, they are easily mistaken for Wicklow Cheviots, which are the standard strain in this part of the world.
Look a little closer and you may detect that they are slightly smaller than the Cheviots, for they are lleyns.
The breed has its origins in Wales and these Enniskerry pedigreed examples are among the first to be seen in Ireland.
If Michael Keegan has his way, such sights will become commonplace as he continues his search for the perfect figure two.
As he points out, each lamb has two teats, so two lambs is the ideal.
The birth of two sets of healthy quads this year along with all the threes may be an impressive sign of fertility but it leads to a complicated game of mixing and matching to ensure that each lamb has a teat it may depend on.
Eighteen years back, the reproductive rate was around the 1.3 mark and Michael insists that anything near to the figure one is simply not economic.
He inherited a flock whose genes were largely a mixture of Cheviot and Suffolk, a blend of the two long established favourites, with ewes that bulked out to a comfortable 80 kilos.
‘ They were a bigger sheep but they did not produce the goods and they cost more to feed,’ he says dispassionately. ‘ They are completely gone from here. I am a bit of a King Herod!’
A decade ago, Michael replaced all the old stock to make way for the Welsh lleyns, which hit the scales on maturity at just 70 kilos, 10 kilos less than their predecessors.
It was a dramatic move and he had to travel to the UK in order to ring the changes.
His first expedition was to Scotland, bringing back a batch of 20 lleyns sold to him by a man called Derek Stein in Lockerbie.
The Scottish imports were so impressive that he was soon back for more, this time heading to Cumbria in the north east corner of England to purchase a set of 250 replacement hoggets, young females all soon to be mothers.
‘Lleyns are sexy at the moment. They are white-faced, medium sized sheep, very prolific and very milky, so they can mean a big crop of lambs,’ he gives the sales pitch for the breed.
‘I changed to them because I felt that I could not get any more lambs out of the Cheviot crosses, though the 1.7 or 1.8 I was getting was not bad.
‘Some of the older guys thought Keegan had lost the run of himself.
‘But if things keep going as they are, there will be a large amount of Welsh lleyns in the country in ten years time’
Sheep farming is full of ‘older guys’ and he believes many of them have missed a trick by sticking to their established blood lines.
He points to the change which has taken place in Britain where the lleyns were on the verge of extinction in the 1980s, before going on to be the current top of the flocks.
‘Younger guys want more bang for their buck,’ says Michael. ‘ The lleyns produce more and eat less.’ It is as simple as that.
He reveals that he has experimented with several other breeds – Texel, Charollais and even the glamorously named Berrichon du Cher.
But he reckons that the quest for the perfect two in Irish conditions boils down to the choice between lleyns and Belclares. The lattter is a a strain of similarly lightweight sheep developed in Ireland for Irish conditions.
At 37 years of age, Michael warns anyone thinking of following his example that sheep farming is a young man’s game, involving a great deal of often physically demanding work.
It is also essential to have a properly trained dog, especially for someone who usually has no one to assist him, and he shakes his head at the notion that a quad bike could be an alternative to a good collie.
‘I wouldn’t bother with quads – a dog does the work of five quads.’
He has also enlisted the help of modern information technology, keeping tabs on each animal after microchipping them at birth to track breeding and feeding patterns.
Each lamb is weighed on arrival and again in May as their owner looks for rapid weight gain, part of the process of seeing how good his rams are.
The ideal ram carries the twin gene and his progeny put on 300 grams per day.
The monitoring also helps to identify the ewes which carry single lambs or small lambs – they may find themselves heading unceremoniously for the kebab shop.
He is keenly aware that 80 per cent of Irish lamb is exported and that Brexit may spell changes in the market which could be challenging to someone who aims to earn a living from farming, the thing he does best. The reality already is that most sheep producers need either income from other sources or a very large number of sheep.
With his Welsh lleyns, Michael Keegan is attempting to find an alternative way of remaining viable.
LLEYNS ARE SEXY AT THE MOMENT. THEY ARE WHITEFACED, MEDIUM SIZED SHEEP, VERY PROLIFIC AND VERY MILKY, SO THEY CAN MEAN A BIG CROP OF LAMBS