Paula Hynes: A visit from a scholar
International, At Promar Farm With Dairy Senior Hands Environmental Mcfadzean The Hattie Getting Consultant On Hynes
We are no strangers to having visitors on the farm, and this week, we had a UK visitor. Hattie McFadzean is a senior sustainability consultant with Promar International which is a leading provider of consultancy for farmers, food producers and retailers. Companies like that are crucial when it comes to sustainability as they understand and work with the entire supply chain.
Hattie worked in southeast Asia for a number of years working closely with the agricultural sector and now living just outside London, she has a passion for working closely with stakeholders in the Ag sector to improve transparency of information regarding sector emissions and opportunities for green growth.
She certainly understands the supply chain because after a brief tour of the farm, she was in the milking parlour with us and is a dab hand at putting on clusters.
People like Hattie are a huge asset to the agri industry. As we rise to the challenge of reducing emissions, it is crucial to have people who can come on farm, work alongside farmers, listen and understand the challenges at farm level and then take that knowledge up through the supply chain as when we all play our part in sustainability, the results are cumulative.
The farmer is working with climate change every day, battling changing weather and seasonal changes and trying to adapt how they farm to deal with those changes whilst also adapting new ways of farming to reduce emissions.
It is not just a one-solution fix. Changes are being made to breeding practices, genetics, feed additives, slurry additives, slurry management, fertilisers, crop production, energy use and production... the list goes on.
Likewise, the food processor is looking at new ways of processing that farm produce and preparing it for the retail sector, transport from farm to processors and onwards to supermarkets.
Those retail outlets and restaurants are also adapting to become greener so that the food in the consumer's shopping basket or dinner plate is more climate-friendly than anything they have eaten before.
Our chat with Hatttie meandered from the milking parlour, to the dinner table and continued over a glass of wine. She is a Nuffield Scholar, and her topic is 'Enhancing the resilience of the dairy sector, how do we practically adapt to increasingly volatile climate conditions'.
It truly is inspirational to see her visiting so many farms. Research can deliver so much, but it is how easy the farmer can implement that research on-farm daily that counts and, at the same time, taking into account the changing environment that the farmer must also work in. Amongst all that, the greatest sustainability question of all is can the farmer make a sustainable living and afford to invest in reducing emissions.
As part of her scholarship, she has already spent time in South America, spent the last two weeks in Ireland and will venture to India, which is home to the largest amount of dairy cows in the world.
A trip to an African country is also a possibility and, a must, in my opinion. While we constantly talk about reducing Ag emissions, we often forget how important food security is within that conversation. Those in third world countries might not have access to the same technology, but food, in many cases, is mere survival but they are also the people who are even more impacted by climate change and need to adapt how they produce food while also doing it in a sustainable manner.
After all the great chat about global farming and Irish dairy, it was an early start for us all the following morning as Hattie was heading east to visit an inspirational organic farm manager, Kevin O'Hanlon. I was half tempted to jump in the car with her and learn a bit from Kevin as he is always adapting how he farms and trying new ways of management.
Grazing conditions have been excellent this autumn with ground conditions have been superb, we got hammered by the weather in the autumn of 2023, had to house cows early and open silage clamps far too early so it is a relief to get close to the end of the final grazing rotation with no paddocks damaged by the cows and the silage pit still unopen.
Cows are being buffer fed with a red clover silage and haylage mix before returning to the paddocks and this has kept them really content. Weather has been mild up to now so we will carry a nice cover of grass into the winter, which will be welcome next spring for early calving cows.
Midterm break is upon us now and the weather looks settled after the bank holiday weekend with high pressure building so our maize silage will be harvested early in the week, crops have been slow to ripen this autumn, I suppose the lack of sunshine throughout the summer and mild weather lately has delayed ripening.
It will be our first time calving all our heifers a month earlier but as weather has changed how we farm, we are trying to adapt our calving patterns and also gain efficiency so the first lactations will now gain days in milk going forward giving them longer time to prepare for which is a shorter breeding season for the main spring herd.
