How Paula Hynes is working to make farming life sustainable

Paula is a co-founder of Ag Mental Health Week, which began in 2020 as a global awareness campaign for mental health in Agriculture and has also achieved a certification in suicide crisis response.

She and her husband, Peter, linked up with Samaritans Ireland and Dairy Industry Ireland in 2021 to work on a project where the Samaritans support number (116 123) was placed prominently on 500 milk tankers of 10 Irish dairy processors at a time when morale was very low across the dairy farming sector.

In 2017, having not travelled for many years, Paula ventured to Kenya to live with a Maasai community for three weeks, which was filmed for RTÉ as the Hardest Harvest documentary.

She has since sponsored one of the Maasai community to attend University in Nairobi to achieve a bachelor’s in arts, education and social science. What makes Paula’s story all the more remarkable is that she is not from a farming background. Having worked in retail for many years, beginning her farming career in late 2014 alongside her husband, Peter.

The pair expanded their dairy herd in 2015, from 50 cows to a 180-cow herd of pedigree Holsteins and Jerseys, using breeding indexes to improve the efficiency, and therefore, environmental sustainability, of the herd. In 2017, the couple were jointly named farmer of the year.

The couple are both passionate about farming in a sustainable way, embracing practices to reduce the farm’s emissions, and in 2022, became the first commercial dairy farm in Ireland to feed a methane-reducing feed additive.

As a mother of three daughters, Chloe, Becky and Georgie, she strives to set a positive example and give them the confidence and support to pave their own futures in farming and equine industries.

To support her daughters’ passion for dairy farming, in 2022, she began showing livestock for the first time and could be seen competing alongside her daughters at several local agricultural shows.

She became a contributor to the weekly Farming supplement in the Irish Examiner in late 2022.