‘I thought you could just transfer the Irish dairy system to Germany, but Ireland is very special’

For German student Ebba Nagel there was only one country to go to when she wanted to learn more about grass-based dairy farming.

The image of Ireland and its agriculture, she says, is very strong in Germany.

“When you watch TV (in Germany)and you have Kerrygold, you see there is a big image about the grazing in Ireland,” she says. “I also wanted to stay in Europe as I wanted to take my car.”

However, while Ebba’s decision to be a farmer was easy, the path was less straightforward.

“I grew up on a dairy farm in Germany, but my father stopped farming in 2006 as the milk price was so poor.”

Her parents sold the farm, outside Hamburg, but Ebba’s interest was still there and during school she worked on a neighbour’s farm to earn pocket money.

“I finished school when I was 19 and wanted to go farming so did an apprenticeship for two years to become a farmer,” she says.

“As part of the course you pick out a farm where you want to spend a year and I decided to work on a dairy farm, quite a big one with 450 cows and milking three times a day.

“I spent a year there and then worked on a 120-cow organic dairy farm. They did a bit of grazing on this farm and I wanted to get to know more about this and decided to go to Ireland.”

She first tried to move to Ireland through an agency but that didn’t work out so Ebba took to finding a host farm herself, searching for Irish dairy farmers on the internet.

“I read articles about farmers in Ireland and contacted them myself saying I wanted to get some experience and if it was possible to work on their farm,” she says.

In 2018 she landed on the farm of dairy farmer Paddy Galvin in Kilbrittan, Co Cork, spending three months on the farm before she went travelling and working on other farms as a relief milker until 2021.

But when Covid struck she found herself heading back to Germany and going to university to undertake a degree in agriculture.

“Everything was closed and I had not seen my family in a year and a half, so I headed back,” she says.

With another work placement necessary it was an easy decision for Ebba to head back to Cork, for a ninemonth stint on David Deasy’s farm, where she had worked previously.

“I had to do a practical semester and wanted to go back to Ireland and do the calving season. I had milked a few times for David and he needed someone and I worked for him for nine months,” she says.

“I loved work on his farm. I was able to try out a lot of new things in David’s place, he was very open-minded and it was great to see improvements in things we did.

“We have an indoor system in Germany, the cows are not going out grazing and we don’t have the calving seasons. They are calving all year round.

“We also have high-yielding cows, bred to produce a lot of milk, so it’s a completely different system.

“I thought you could just transfer the Irish system to Germany, but Ireland is very special, you have the climate and the grass growth and the fields nearby the farms, whereas in Germany you have fragmented farms, so it’s not possible.

“You also have different breeds as we have a lot of Jersey in Germany and it’s important to have a farm that is suitable to the ground and nutritional qualities.”