Young Farmer of the Year Liam Hanrahan and achieving top performance on a heavy farm

Young Farmer of the Year Liam Hanrahan joins Emma-Louise Coffey on this week’s Dairy Edge to give an insight into his farming career, his research findings and future plans.

Liam farms in milking 180 dairy cows in partnership with his parents Willie and Catherine in Doonbeg, Co Clare. Liam describes the performance of the farm in 2019, producing 512 kg milk solids per cow, high fertility with an 82% 6 week calving rate and 14 tonne DM grass production.

 Despite growing a lot of grass, Liam explains that farming on heavy clay and peaty soil combined with high rainfall presents challenging grazing conditions, allowing for a shorter grazing season from mid-March to late October.

Notwithstanding this, Liam credits grassland management as the key driver of the production performance achieved and emphasise the importance of measurement. Liam completed 40 measurements in 2019, including 2 measurements per week during peak growth.

Liam also provides information on the dairy economics research he carried out during his time completing research at Moorepark. Liam identified grass utilisation as the key driver of profit, for every additional 1 tonne of grass utilised profit increases by €173 per hectare.

Looking to the future, Liam explains they have reached optimal cow numbers on their milking platform and they are striving to hit high efficiency across all key performance indicators metrics on the farm.

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