How this part-time farmer went from four heifers to being Ireland’s biggest pedigree Angus breeder

“I was on a serious salary but I felt I had spare time on my hands. Once I got going there was no stopping me.

“I’m considering further increasing the herd — the only thing that will stop me is the shortage of qualified labour.”

The scale and pace of the expansion has turned heads around Lisseycasey.

“There were people around here that said I’d never fill it, when I built the first cattle shed,” Oliver says. “I’ve added a few more since.”

Oliver’s motivation has never been financial.

“It does not always have to be all about money. It is about more — if I can achieve something,” he says.

“If you had told someone 10 years ago there was an opening to have 200 suckler cows in a small village in Co Clare, they’d have thought were were gone bonkers.”

Oliver has bought eight farms totalling 500ac over the last decade — ranging in size from 18ac to 118ac, all but one within a radius of eight miles.

He and local contractors carried out extensive reclamation; reseeding; fencing, adding water supply; providing roads and other infrastructure on the fragmented holdings; and constructing housing for 700 head of stock.

There is an additional 300ac of leased land in three blocks.  

Oliver, a father of four, runs a hands-on vehicle testing centre 12 miles away in Ennis.

A local contractor is engaged for silage making, and a manager, Noel Keating, is now employed on the farm, assisted by Oliver in the evenings and at weekends.

Up to 100 pedigree Angus bulls are sold off the farm each year, mostly to repeat customers.

Growing up on a small farm, Oliver had worked with a contractor to fund his third-level education, before getting a well-paid job with a multi-national company in Limerick.”

His father Michael had a small commercial suckler herd on the farm.

“I felt that it was going to be the same cost to run a commercial as a pedigree and I wanted the added value of the pedigree,” Oliver says.

“I went Angus for easy calving, and the cows were light on the ground, which suited the land around here.

“But if I’d gone commercial with Angus, I felt it would not be viable with what I’d get for the weanlings.

“I then bought more heifers, mostly from Dr Pat Meehan in groups of 10. I was up to about 50 cows on my own but I could not manage it because I was trying to be in the garage and on the farm and reclaiming the land.

“There was so much going on and I needed to hire in some full-time help, but to do that I needed to move up a gear. I hired in Noel and set a target of going to 220 cows.”

Expanding the herd while buying and reclaiming land and building the infrastructure was a difficult task, Oliver explains.

“It was challenging to manage cash flow, because we were expanding so quickly and there was the extra workload of managing the herd,” he says.

“I had to expand the herd to cover the extra cost of the land and buildings to back up that. There was no point in having one piece of the jigsaw in place. It would not have worked.

“There were tough years when I was in expansion mode — years when I had 50 cows and was trying to keep extra cows, which were very severe on cash flow because I was keeping all of the heifers to build up the herd.

“We decided to put all of the housing on one farm, because if we were going to keep the stock at different farms for the winter we’d be all the time of the road and need machinery on every farm, which would have added cost and would not have been practical.”

He decided to put the housing beside the largest block of silage ground.

To qualify for entitlements under the Young Farmer Scheme, Oliver had to complete the Green Cert, travelling to Teagasc Centre at Grange to do it.

“Time was not on my side. I had to have it done before I reached 35. I achieved that and qualified for the development grant at maximum level which was a great benefit,” he says.

So what were the main difficulties he encountered?

“I suppose the biggest difficulty was that there was a new farm coming on line nearly every year so I had to organise a grazing plan, stock numbers, fencing water etc… and holding pens, cattle crushes a huge amount of infrastuctural work was going on as well as the daily tasks.

“It was easier at the start. I had 25 cows on rented land when I purchased the first 18ac of land and it was easy to put all my energy into getting that land ready.

“Later there was up to 700 stock to manage every day while doing the next big job on infrastructure.

So what would he have done differently if he could have his time again?

“At the start, I would have bought a bigger farm in a more central location, because the long-term management of the fragmented farm is probably the biggest hurdle. But it wasn’t possible at that time.”

‘There is a serious demand for red heifers’

“We are breeding the bulls suitable mainly for the dairy market, so we are trying to produce an animal that is easy calving, with short gestation but has good carcase conformation and good carcase size — that ticks all the important boxes,” says Oliver Haugh.

Around half the cows on Oliver’s farm are calving down to AI and the rest to stock bulls.

He paid €8,600 for Ernehill Sampson, the leading-price Angus bull at Carrick-on-Shannon last December — “a fabulous-looking bull with good confirmation, and he has the figures and the easy calving”.

“It is very hard to get an animal that has it all,” he says. “I agree with figures but figures are not always right, and just because they have five stars does not always mean they tick all the boxes.

“If you go too much on easy calving you are going to lose your carcase size and conformation, so we are trying to use some fairly selective bulls on the herd.”

In AI, Kealkil Prime Lad, which is good on the beef side and easy calving, and Lanigan Red Deep Canyon “a tremendous bull” have been used.
“We moved into some reds and bought maiden heifers and a couple of stock bulls from John Lanigan in Thurles, who bought in some stock from Canada and did some embyros.

“I have about 40 red females — there is a serious demand for red heifers, and anyone who bought a red bull from us came back for more. I suppose it is a craze; whether it will last or not I don’t know.”

As to the future, Oliver believes that breeding policy may have reached a pivotal point.

“I’m starting to watch where the suckler beef is going,” he says. “Is there going to be more dairy-beef, and is Angus going to be the kept runner? It well could be.

“There has been a rapid expansion in dairy. Sexed semen is getting more successful, which is going to halve the cows in-calf to Holstein-Friesian and open a big gap for more bulls.

“But if the dairy men don’t produce bull calves that are good enough that the man buying him can rear him, bring him to a good size carcase and make a few pounds, it is not going to work.

"Everyone has to be able to make something out of it or else it won’t work. I feel that Angus will be in good demand.”