Sustainable Parasite Control Visits

Our first stop was to Philip O’Leary and Aileen Sheehan’s farm in Whitechurch, Co. Cork. The couple milk 138 cows on a 125 acre milking block, with an additional 50 acres rented for silage and youngstock. “Happy Cows = Happy Life” is a motto they swear by. They follow a proactive approach to sustainable farming, with the majority of the farm reseeded, implementing cover crops as well as other measures. As part of their dosing regime, calves are consistently weighed from birth to track ADG. By tracking calves progress, along with faecal sampling, this allows them to target treat only calves that do need a dose. This allows the calves to develop their immunity at grass, reduces costs, ensures calves are hitting their benchmark weights and most importantly, helps mitigates resistance to wormers.

We also visited Bruce Thompson’s Farm in Ballyfin, Co. Laois, our Ambassador Farmer for SPARC. Thompson milks 270 cows on 250 hectares, including a milking block of 100 hectares. Biodiversity is a huge focus on this farm, with the dung beetle being a passion project of Bruce’s. By focusing on a targeted and selective approach to wormers, he has protected and increased his dung beetle population on farm, whilst also reducing costs and resistance risk. Dung beetles naturally improve soil health by “tunnelling”, break down dung pats and disrupt parasite lifecycles, a fantastic natural tool on any farm. He also implements a “traffic light grazing” system which involves mapping pastures in terms of risk. Risk for worm burden is estimated based on field usage, i.e. a newly reseeded field or silage aftermath = low risk (GREEN), whereas a paddock that is used every year as a first turn out field = high risk (RED). He then avoids red high risk fields for his young animals that are most sensitive to disease from gut worms.