Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Good farmer, good weather, good fortune, good relationships, good land. We need all the goods in our favour.

Couldnt agree more i remember selling calves in the mart one day two of my gd neighbours were there they had calves out friesian cows 40 euro angus things were bad at the time i had same age calve angus 200.

I know a young lad thats pure useless working for a builder 5 days a week sweeping tidying up 1000 per week home any workers is on 200 a day it woukdnt be worth showing up otherwise it was your relatived chiice to takeba lowly paud job

I crunched some more numbers and this is what I got:

The average cow in Ireland produced 5,700 litres of milk last year 

So we can work off the basis that 70 cows would do 399,000L (we will leave out the fact a person would start with heifers and have less milk) 

Average margin over 10 years is 13c/L

That’s working out at leaving you almost exactly the equivalent of €1,000/week in profit which you would require to live anyway, you’re not going to live on the wind 

Presuming a person gets no tax credits from their spouse they’d have €770/week of a net wage from their own farm 

As @daiymann 5 said in the first place , you could probably rent out the 90 acres for €400/acre and make €36,000/year tax tree which would leave you with €692/week

Anyone investing in their farm now needs to be working off the assumption that after 2030 or so the nitrates derogation is going to be gone. We are the last country in the EU that still have it. The writing is on the wall. 

No offence to anyone but as regards encouraging the man to spend €300,000 to go milking cows, the phrase “misery loves company” really does come to mind 😂😂

I know a man, he’s a fleet of taxis. Long story short he does some school runs. Gets €50-60K for each one per year. 5 year contracts. I’m not talking about big buses, these are small minivans. 7 or 8 or so kids in them. After the contract is up it’s put up for tender again then. You’re guaranteed that money for the whole contract, regardless of whether or not the kids turn up etc 

With all due respect, kilograms of milk solids are irrelevant if they don’t leave a profit. I could buy in maize silage and have the best solids on this thread, but I’d likely be losing money doing it.

I’m sure the individual mentioned made more than 13c/L last year, but I’m talking about the long-term average margin. If you can’t meet a loan repayment today, a bank manager won’t care how much money you made four years ago when prices were flying.

I’ve said it here before: a good businessman is someone in the right place at the right time. Is dairy farming—as a new entrant facing the loss of the derogation and a year of poor milk prices—the right place to be in 2026?

My own great-grandfather bought this farm by bottling his own milk 100 years ago. My grandfather stopped doing it 50 years ago. Timing is everything. If I tried bottling my own milk now, it would be a financial catastrophe.

ypur first paragraph there is something straight out of the journal or a dis hard kiwi Tegasc advisor

I know there's no financial aspect to it but imo bringing up kids on a farm is priceless. Have had 101 young lads at the day job over the years and by and large any fella off a farm was streets ahead of the others.

Even the spent doing school runs etc, most lads besides me are commuting to Dublin every day. Good money on sites etc but a dog's life with traffic nowadays, barely see the kids for an hour or two in the evening.

That’s a starting salary of little over 400 per week after all the Council deductions . Yet someone here was quoting 1000 per week working for the Council as an alternative to milking cows.

they weren’t getting €1k a week, that’s just BS, look at the link Bass has above, I know whatever they were getting it was too much but they weren’t getting that, there no young lad getting it for sweeping the ground for a builder either

Council wont give you 39 hours per week sweeping and cleaning.There is a difference between driving a machine sweeping and manually sweeping footpaths and I take it the latter is what was referred to in previous post.

Id suggesting chatting to a lad doing the sweeping before you cash in the cows and rent the place.