Signs you are dealing with a 'Rooter'

Wildsurfer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120046739#Comment_120046739

Same story here, I was 17 when it fell upon me to take it on. I really struggled mid twenties when I really wanted to do some travelling with my friends who were at it but felt there was no way to get away. I would have sold out cows for a few years except I'd have lost milk quota so that really felt like a weight around my shoulders. Like you hope the next generation here get to experience what I didn't.

chooseusername

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120046802#Comment_120046802

" Like you hope the next generation here get to experience what I didn't."

Careful what you wish for.

When the time comes, as it will soon enough, it'll be the same sh1t, different toilet.

cute geoge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120044030#Comment_120044030

build your shed with heavy duty locks ,fuk the dairy lads bounding dont give them an inch when your time comes .What age is the quare fellow and are there other siblings to be fixed up when your time comes

Jjameson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120047874#Comment_120047874

A good dairy farmer will have the silver to put a shine on a field that drystock never will. Tax free. Life’s too short for that attitude I think Bull.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120043457#Comment_120043457

At 80, might there be health issues at play to explain the eccentric behaviour? Hopefully not but, it can manifest itself over a long period of time making it seem like he's always been that way.

carrollsno1

Reading through the replies it seems like im making it out to be a succession issue, its not that at all its the issue of money being wasted in unneccesary areas of the farm while important areas are being neglected. I made it out NYE to town and i was introduced and recognised as one of the lads with the tractor with no doors on it. I was also talking to a friend before Christmas a tidy operator would be running a nice calf to beef system as his own along with the parents enterprise great hands and a great head on him and hes on about going to Australia this spring for as long as theyll keep them as the auld fella wont let him do a big clean up on the yard at home.

Siamsa Sessions

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120058019#Comment_120058019

Every farm and every father/son relationship is different, but two garages told me last year that "No farmer's son will drive an old tractor now."

I was looking for a tractor at the time and my budget was small. But the two garages said those types of tractors just weren't there any more, coz "No farmer's son..."

Could be two things: (1) The young lad is not on the farm and the father is pulling/dragging away himself, (2) The young lad is after getting around his father and they have a 20-year old tractor, rather than a 40-year old one.

I don't envy you. One of the reasons I sold the cows and leased the place 20 years ago was because of family relationships (can't think of a more polite way to say it!). Maybe a few months working in Australia with your buddy wouldn't the worst thing in the world?

893bet

I am a farmers son and have one door fully missing. Lower pain of glass broken on the second door. Rear window missing (mission to get this fixed, hinge broke and it’s been off ten years, we used have a back end grab window was open always).

now I have no idea of how good your tractor is/age/HP.

But a new tractor won’t improve bottom line, tidying yard won’t improve the bottom line.

If your tractor always starts, even in frosty weather than it’s worth it’s weight in gold. I considered changing ours as it’s a rough enough Massey and instead doubled down on it and in process of getting engine rebuilt. That will prob cost 5k when finished but will be money we’ll spent if she lasts another 10 years versus buying an expensive second hand one (that will come with its own problem).

I remember a neighbour when I questioned why he never put up a shed and slats (he has a yard with ring feeds and scrapes into a slurry pit). His answer was “will the shed make the cattle fatter”. It stayed with me.

for meImprovement need to

1) either improve revenue or profit

2) make life significant easier or save time.

White Clover

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120059214#Comment_120059214

Different strokes for different folks.

By maintaining one’s machinery to a good standard can substantially add value too. And it was never more true than over the last 5 years.

Some lads including myself prefer to spend a few Bob improving and keeping things right. I’d get more satisfaction out of that than an extra couple of grand in the bank account.

Dunedin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120059214#Comment_120059214

1) A tractor that is fully weather proof will certainly make life easier.

2) a shed for the cattle will make life easier.

everyone to their own but I can’t for the life of me understand how some farmers make no effort to either clean up the place or make life a bit easier.

I have a neighbour that is in the yard 12 hours a day every day of the year nearly. I spend 1 hour max. he’s always complaining that there’s no money in farming. I do alright on my place and it would be not far off half the size.

kevthegaff

We used to have 3 tractors and a loader. At one stage one tractor would start the rest of em, money was short back then. We had another tractor on a hill farm where she was left in gear and a hammer on de handbrake to start. Fiats were great to start on a hill with very little speed. Reps made big changes 20yrs ago, all pallets, plastic, old steel and rubbish were removed from every ditch. It made big changes to the countryside.

893bet

I am not disagreeing with you lads. All I am saying it’s not worth falling out with the old lad over.

Some scrap machinery around the place won’t ruin it. Your time will come to clean it up.

If the tractor starts and is mechanical sound then it will do for now. A new tractor will come with different problems.

Succession planning is difficult I guess. Forget about investment/tidy up until you are financially responsible for the farm. Maybe I am lucky with my old fella that he doesn’t pass comment on anything I do. But he is 83 now so despite being fit for his age realistically is able to do little but invaluable to spot sickness or changes in animals.

Grueller

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120059214#Comment_120059214

That man that asked, "will the shed make the cattle fatter", does he have a successor?

There is certainly merit in what he says, e.g don't build in unnecessary expense.

The other side of that is that I have a friend that is 42 and has brothers 40 and 44. Their father has a herd of 140 very good cows, plenty of land, has about 150 acres in tillage too. The cows are all in cubicle houses around a yard like you describe and fed in round feeders for the winter. Cubicle houses and yard scrept with a super dexta back into an open lagoon. Cows then need to be locked into cubicles, and milked one cubicle house at a time, let back over and locked in again before repeating 5 times per milking, through an 8 unit parlour. It is a life of incessant work and slog due to not spending anything for years about the yard.

The father is now 72 with the 3 sons in very good jobs. He wants my friend to come home and take over. He is in an €80k per year role plus perks. He is reluctant to go because he says he needs to spend about €4-500k on a parlour, slurry storage and all cubicles need replacing. He says he would be 10-15 yrs paying it back and at that stage would be late to mid 50s. Constant smaller investment would have solved this problem.

893bet

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120059916#Comment_120059916

He doesn’t have a successor. So definitely a factor. But he does invest where makes sense.

The lad you describe is other side of the coin but it also sounds like the son is not interested And want to walk into a place that is perfect. The place is managing to milk 140 cows all alongside there is no way 400-500k is needed. Son doesn’t deserve it. 140 good cows, plus tillage land and he is moaning still 😀. If he don’t take it another son will and he will end up with a “site”…. But that’s the choice.

Grueller

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120061766#Comment_120061766

All due respect 893 but you have the man wrong. He was mad to come home 10 years ago but the father would give him no head at all. His career has taken off now and he is reluctant to leave it to basically start over.

By The way have you priced a parlour for 140 cows recently? €100k minimum for the machine, feeders and tank (At the momentthe tank is too small and pumping to an overflow tank before the last milking before collection). Do the building then to put the parlour in. That's €150-200k straight away. He has an open lagoon only for slurry storage. He needs a cubicle house with slurry storage for 140 cows. The steel cubicle and a basic mat is €150 plus VAT. That's €21000 just on those, scrapers €15k minimum. That's €36k on 2 finishing items. As I said earlier, no disrespect, but I am not sure you understand the cost involved in setting up to dairy at that scale hq. This lad gave 20+ hrs a week on top of his 9-5 for 20 years almost but has a great life built up elsewhere.

The brothers won't take it. They couldn't even find the tillage ground, it's 2 miles from the yard and the boys never even picked a stone from it.

Jjameson

What does he do?

Grueller

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120062410#Comment_120062410

I don't want to say exactly JJameson, if anyone else knows him it would identify him straight away. Public sector role with a nice bit of work from home and flexibility.

Biggest perk I mentioned is he would be eligible to retire at 58 on a pension of about €49k. Be retiring on that at the same time all investment be paid off.

He wants the father to get out of milk and go all tillage. He likes the cows but with all tillage he can stay in the job and tip away on holidays. The volume of work he would have would keep contractors loyal to him.

The father wants to stay in cows. That's the crux of it.

jaymla627

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120062363#Comment_120062363

I'd say at a minimum 4-5k per cow would have to be spent sounds like a entire greenfield site needed for housing and parlour, with current interest rates he'd be in for well over a million by the time it's paid back....

Where was the money being made going down through the years that noting was spent on yard land purchases I'm guessing

Grueller

Land purchase and an extensive property empire of 3 shops and a lot of rental houses.

893bet

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120062363#Comment_120062363

I have no idea of cost. But the farm is currently capable of milking the 140 (with some hardship). Everything doesn’t have to be spent at once so the place is turn key. Not to mention Vat will be claimed back, grants are available and expense can be capitalised against what must be a sizeable tax bill.

It sounds like a 4million quid farm. 150 acres a of tillage and I assume same acres in grass.

Son sounds a little precious but really it’s down to succession planning. He needs to be in financial control of the farm to make the big and small investment decisions.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063579#Comment_120063579

I am feeling less sorry for him. Big public sector pension. 4 million farm. 3 shops, a load of rental house.

and ye are moaning that the farm needs investment and the father is a rooter. Come on like.

older by the day

God help us, ain't he a pity, 140 cows and 100 acres of tillage land. The poor fellow and he's expected to take over that. I took over twenty cows and two round feeders and a pipeline stall. We will nearly have to take up a collection for that poor guy. The value of the property alone is like winning the lottery

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063652#Comment_120063652

I can think of a similar place but the son couldn't face working with the rooter of a father and I couldn't blame him. I milked for the man for a weekend he was away, never again.

Parlour gates that don't close, a pit that doesn't drain, every gate hung with wire, and badly tied at that, cows pushing through them, over them, round feeders everywhere, knee deep ****, troughs with pipes sticking out so having to fix his broken pipes twice so the cows would have water, tractor loaded up with bale netting 3 feet high at the back, bales in a dip with a foot of water, tools hidden, nothing at hand when something needed a fix, netting and plastic everywhere, cows pushing through wires and tearing in to the closed silo pit, water pump pipe fucked, nothing on the farm to repair it, got my own joiner so I could wash the place and on and on and on and I'm leaving out a lot of the bigger ones and the bigger ones are really something special.

You'd go mental if you had to put up with it and I don't mean that as a figure of speech, and that's before you would factor in the investment needed to straighten it.

No money is worth having to put up with the likes of that.

DBK1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063652#Comment_120063652

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063693#Comment_120063693

I don’t think ye are seeing the point @Grueller is making. The son is in an €80k per year job and can retire in 16 years time with €49k per year of a pension.

Why would he leave that to go through the rest of his life killing himself mucking around the yard like his father is doing for at best similar money but without the pension at the end? If he wants to take over the farm and make life simpler to do it then €500k is probably a reasonable estimate of what is needed. He will then put his earnings into paying that back for the next 10-15 years so will have a much smaller salary himself and still nowhere near the pension available to him now and will have nowhere near the same lifestyle and time off with family etc. that’s available to him now.

@older by the day like yourself I inherited not much more than round feeders and a handful of stock and built it up from there myself. There’s nothing I’m happier at than farming so I was always going to go that road but financially if I had the other option available to me that this man has I would have been an idiot to turn my back on it to stay farming.

The moral I take from @Grueller story, as a non dairy farmer, is for all the money the rest of us are being told the dairy men are making, there’s none of it being made without hard work and major investment in the first place. If a lad is in his 20’s getting the farm he has time to make that investment, work hard, pay it off and still should have plenty of years to build up a retirement pot from it and enjoy his farming. For a lad in his 40’s, if he’s to make that commitment then he’s due to retire by the time the hard work is done and he has it paid for so will never get them relatively debt free years to enjoy what he does and build up his retirement pot. He’s also not going to be as fit and hardy as he would have been in his 20’s and 30’s to put the hard hours in so it will take more of a toll on his health.

I personally think that man would be an idiot to leave his job to go back to the type of messing his father is at.

The father has questions to answer too, if he has made enough of money to build up a property portfolio he could easily have handed over the reins to the farm 10 years ago when his sons were early 30’s. I would see him as either an idiot, or plain and simple greedy, for not handing it over sooner. Why wait until his sons have good off farm jobs and live’s established before looking for one of them to drop all that and farm. In my eyes the 3 sons would be better off away from the father and let him kill himself at it or do what he likes with it.

As farmers we all worry and complain about the age profile of farmers as it’s getting older every year but if lads are going to wait until the next generation are in their 40’s before giving them control then what do we expect.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063872#Comment_120063872

The story I'm hearing is the father want's to live the son's life for him. If he want's to leave him the farm then he has to accept that it's the son's time now. I wouldn't want to go back to that sh1t either, being a rooter would come as a distant second.

White Clover

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120063872#Comment_120063872

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120059695#Comment_120059695

The farm probably has a turnover of 750k per year. Plenty capacity there for investment straight away and make the job easier while still having a good income.

Say my name

I can see all sides in this or at least I think I can.

There's the father who's bought a second farm and retail units completely by the way that he's farming. He knows where to invest the money. But he also knows the milking cows allowed him to get to where he is now.

There's the son who knows an easier life with guaranteed income and that pension pot at the end if he continues as is. He knows he will have to spend money if he continues with the cows and if he doesn't want to suffer the physical and emotional hardship that the current set up will bring. He loses business autonomy by going back with the father. The tillage suggestion is his way of avoiding all this and putting his own stamp on it without the capital expenditure.

But the father knows hardship and knows where the money came from that allowed him to get where he is today.

Tricky situation but it's not life or death. But then again it's families which can be made out that way for self interest and one overship.

Grueller

Made clear to him that the investment properties are split between the other 2 brothers.

DBK1 has hit the nail on the head with my point. Why take on the hardship when his life is set so well already. If the father had offered him this chance 10 yrs ago he would have took hand and all. He is just too far down the other path to leave 20 years work and promotions and a pension to start all over again.

By the way I am not criticising the father. He is a phenomenal man to have built what he has built. Made of iron and the mother equally so. They are not falling out over it at all and the son nor father have no I'll will toward each other. I just see it as an example of poor planning on succession more than anything.

Edit: The father is not a rooter by the way. Far from it, but he can see no harm in spending 12-14 hours every day working. Great cows, great land, well fenced but couldn't see a return on investment in the yard. In my opinion only that's a large part of the reason the son doesn't want to go home. He still does 3 milkings every weekend though and takes 3 weeks holidays during calving. . . . .

Siamsa Sessions

We’re only all passing thru this little life.

Succession and keeping the family name on the land can drive families to distraction and cause untold rows. I doubt anyone on their deathbed or in a nursing home worries about the farm, or the cows, or the yard. They’d sooner have a chat with a son, daughter, grandchildren, an old neighbour, etc.

Rooters are dying out. Cross compliance and QA are seeing to that. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. But maybe some of the characters are dying out too and we’re all becoming more businessmen (and women) rather than farmers. Either way, the clock is only ever running forward for us all.

Anto_Meath

@DBK1 I get what you are saying. It reminds me of a situation I am aware of, I lad near here a few years back decided to set his farm out the minute he turned 65. He has two kids with good jobs and no interest in farming. Between selling the cows and machinery and a few other bits he ended up with €320,000 which he bought a house in Drumcondra in Dublin with. Local big dairy farmers son rented the place on a long term lease and according to accounts has spend over €400,000 on stock and improving the place with new roads and fences. The farm owner has sold the house in Drumcondra and made over a €120,000 on it he has now reinvested in 2 apartments near Dundrum, returning him almost €5,000 a month in rent. I was taking to a lad that know both well and he was saying if it was that easy for the young lad to raise the €400K he would have been better off buying the house, less work, probably similar level of income at the end of the month and far less worries. But some people are so bound to the land they cant see any other option.

blue5000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120064752#Comment_120064752

Grueller is the only one of us that knows this particular farm and family. The rest of us are basically just shooting fish in a barrel. Every family farm is different, we all have different views on how money should be spent, this man spent it on property and expansion.

With the benefit of 20 20 hindsight we'd all probably have done something differently. I took over a run down farm when I was young, my old lad spent his days in bed with depression. With hindsight I should have fcuked off to Australia as a welder and left them to it. But I stuck it out, it wasn't simple.

We're all here speculating what to do in the above farm, it's for the family to work that out for themselves. But there is a lesson here for us all, succession needs to planned for and talked about before it's too late.