Scaling up

Pat Halpin juggles the demands a 350-cow dairy enterprise with running a thriving farm contracting business, reports Derek Casey

WHEN Pat Halpin started off in milk production 20 years ago he had 32 cows. By 2015 that had risen to 120 and it’s now 350 cows and counting.

So the shackles are well and truly off for Pat (41), and his wife Carmel who farm in the heart of the Golden Vale at Lackelly near Knocklong in Co Limerick.

As if the dairy farming enterprise wasn’t challenging enough, in the last few years Pat has also become one of the biggest agricultural contractors in Limerick.

The Halpins have a spring calving herd of 350 Holstein Friesian cows, supplying Dairygold Co-op.

Pat leases 500 acres which leaves little room for error and tight margins.

However, after a challenging three years since scaling up numbers, Pat feels he is only now getting fully on top of managing a dairy enterprise of this size.

He needs 150 acres of pit silage and 2,500 round bales each year to meet fodder requirements.

However, even that wasn’t enough over the exceptional 2017/18 winter, and like many others Pat was forced to import extra fodder as the feeding season seemed to never end. He will be looking to make more silage this year to avoid a repeat scenario next winter.

In 2008 he decided to expand the family business of dairying into agri-contracting services for local dairy and livestock farmers around Knocklong.

He says the move came about after gaining a lot of experience working with machinery and making his own silage over the years.

“It was a natural enough move for me actually because I was already making a lot of silage for myself and had good knowledge of machinery from owning my own kit,” he explained.

“We now employ seven men full-time between the dairy and contracting enterprises, and a key advantage is that we can keep our staff employed year-round by placing them in whichever side of the business is busiest at a given time.”

The result, says Pat, is that he is backed by a dependable local team of workers and doesn’t have to go looking for part-time workers at the last minute each summer.

“We look after the staff well — things like giving them meals and proper pay — and in return they look after me.”

The Halpin contracting team has an impressive range of grass machinery that allows the outfit to offer both a baled and pit silage service to surrounding farmer customers.

They also have the machinery to offer slurry spreading, hedge cutting, drainage and reseeding services.

The fleet is fresh, with plenty of 181 registration plates around the yard. In fact, thanks to a brand new 181-plated Claas Jaguar 860 self-propelled harvester, precision chop silage is a new service offered for the 2018 season; up until this point the team were running three silage wagons (two Strautmanns and a Pottinger).

The silage season has of course now kicked off in earnest and Pat was putting the new Jaguar self-propelled harvester through its paces for the first time over the weekend.

He bought it from local dealer McCarthy’s of Cork, and says the decision to abandon wagons came about as a result of increasingly longer silage hauling distances being encountered. “We just found that as dairy farmers are expanding and growing cow numbers and acreage all the time, the haulage distances were getting too long than is practical for wagon silage,” Pat explained.

Out-farms

“Fellas are renting land here and there with out-farms of 20 or 30 acres found maybe 15 miles away from the main base. It all means more mileage and adds up to big costs and slow progress for wagon silage.

“It was a big decision to switch systems but I’m confident it’s the right move for us at this point. With the dairy business we already have the staff to do it, which might perhaps be a major sticking point for other outfits.

“We bought four new Broughan trailers this year as well to cater for the change in system because obviously you need more haulage capacity for a silage harvester set-up,” he adds.

IT WAS A NATURAL ENOUGH MOVE FOR ME AS I WAS ALREADY MAKING A LOT OF SILAGE FOR MYSELF