04 February 2025
Setting the foundations for a strong year ahead
Michael Gottstein, Head of Sheep Knowledge Transfer, tells us that despite challenges in 2024, Brian and Blathnáid Keane’s farm in Enniscorthy, continues to thrive. Through good management, they’ve navigated weather setbacks, improved grass recovery, and set the stage for a strong year ahead.
Brian and Blathnáid Keane farm 96 hectares in conjunction with Brian’s father John, brother Eoin and young son Sean. The farm is situated in Garr, Davidstown, Enniscorthy and is a sheep, cattle and tillage farm with approximately five hectares of commercial forestry and a further 10 hectares of land taken up by disused quarries, groves, rivers, streams and lanes.
2024 was another difficult sheep year
Following on from significant parasite issues in 2023, last year was a difficult year in terms of grass growth. Ewes in poor body condition struggled to rear lambs successfully. This resulted in lower than expected levels of animal performance and much higher mortality than normal. Every cloud has a silver lining and favourable grass growth in the last quarter of 2024 resulted in good grass growth and excellent levels of utilisation during and after mating.
Sheep
The sheep flock consist of 177 ewes which are predominately Suffolk, Belclare crosses. The flock was ultrasound pregnancy scanned in early January (80 days post ram turnout). Scan results below.
- Litter size 87 (target >1.9)
- Scan rate 81
- Pregnancy rate 6% (target >96%)
The ewes are still outdoors on stubble ground being supplemented with silage. Silage samples taken showed disappointing results with a lot of the silage samples ranging from 67 – 70% DMD.
Very few lambs were slaughtered during the grazing season. Approximately 140 lambs were finished indoors on straw, concentrate and some home grown barley. About 80 of these lambs have been drafted to date with the most recent batch averaging €213/head at €9/kg. The remaining 60 lambs are over 40kg and will be drafted over the coming months.
52 of the best quality ewe lambs have been retained as replacements. These ewe lambs were not mated as the majority of them had not reached the 60% mature weight target for mating as ewe lambs.
Tillage
Approximately half (40 hectares) of productive farmland is dedicated to tillage. Just over six hectares have been sown with winter barley. Brian plans to sow spring malting barley this year in addition to some spring beans (weather permitting).
Due to the relatively late sowing and late harvest of the cereals in 2024 there was no opportunity to sow forage rape as a catch crop after barley. Hopefully 2025 will be better from a weather point of view and some catch crops will be sown to feed ewes over the winter period.
Sucklers
A herd of 25 spring calving suckler cows are co-grazed with the sheep enterprise. The cattle were housed in mid November 2024 and shortly after housing the calves were weaned. The cows are in good condition and are being offered the lowest digestibility silage ad libitum.
Weanling weights are behind previous years probably due to the poor grass growth throughout much of 2024. Currently both bulls and heifer weanlings are being fed on silage plus rolled barley. The plan is to sell both heifer and bull weanlings (except herd replacements) in late February or March.
This article was first published in the Farming Independent