Co Louth man Paul Maguire and his family have been farming for generations now, so Irish Tractor & Agri felt it was time to catch up with the man himself to find out more about his unique farm.
So far as sheep farms go, Maguire Family Farm is far from your typical one.
Situated along the Louth-Meath border near Collon, Paul and his brother Thomas together farm more than 600 acres, with the beef cattle and sheep each being managed separately.
Paul himself specialises in the sheep end of the business and his wife Mary and two teenagers Mark and Olive are all involved on the farm. Both Mark and Olive are heavily involved in the farm, having both taken on the responsibility of a small flock of Jacob sheep, along with a flock of Textel.
“We’re based near Collon in Co Louth and have been on the go for 30 years, but the family itself would be farming for generations,” explained Paul.
“The farm itself is a partnership in that my brother, Thomas, would look after the cattle and I look after the sheep.
“We are running approximately 250 acres of sheep and probably 200 acres of cattle. We’d also rent another 200 acres on top of that.”
At the moment, the Maguires are currently running a combination of 1,500 crossbred ewes and commercial ewes in total, which is a far cry from where the family were when Paul first began working on the farm off the back of a farming apprenticeship.
Their commercial ewes are run with Texel, Dorset and Vendeen rams, along with a batch of 300 ewes – 200 mules and 100 Lleyn cross ewes – and these are exclusively bred with Dorset and Romney rams.
The Maguires do this to ensure that the next few years will see all the breeding ewes be at least half Dorset. Paul believes that this method of breeding will provide a prolific and early lambing ewe.
As aforementioned, the farming tradition in the family stretches back generations and Paul explained that it was his mother that oversaw the farm back when he was growing up and began to learn about the industry.
“It would have been my mother that ran the farm all of her lifetime and that kind of led me towards completing a farm apprenticeship,” he said.
“At that stage it was just a dairy farm and sheep would have come into it around 1985 when I came home from my apprenticeship and started farming. I had an aunt that had some livestock and I was helping her as well.”
Since that time, the growth of the family farm has been colossal with numbers progressing majorly year on year once Paul and Thomas became involved on a full-time basis.
Neither has looked back since and the farm, like so many, is one that requires attention 365 days of the years.
“The way figures went, we were quickly going up from 25 to 50 to 100, so we decided to go big. We went out and got 400 ewes and went from 100 ewes to 400 in 1985,” Paul outlined.
Today, business is as steady as it has ever been for the Maguire clan, as they continually work ahead of themselves in a sense.
This year’s entire lamb crop started to sell around the middle of March, and with haggis’ sales not concluding until the end of April there certainly is a beneficial overlap.
“It’s not so bad. The system that we run here is very unique and quite hard to explain at the same time,” said Paul.
“I think we’ve done just about everything you can do with sheep and we’d be doing six crops of lamb in five years to make sure that we’re always staying ahead of ourselves. Once they lamb in December, they’ve already been sold.
“The crop of lambs we have now in 2016 have already been sold and they all go to Irish Country Meats in Navan.”
Indeed the objective is to have lambs ready for the factory on a weekly basis throughout the year, as they go directly to the meat plant in Navan. That means that while the variation in price will be massive throughout the year, it’s still the average that is most important overall.
In order ensure the constant supply of lambs, the Maguires breed from the beginning of December to April. This makes the Dorset the ideal choice for this system and Paul aims to have six lamb crops in a five-year period.
All of the ewes at Maguire Family Farm are lambed indoors, where there is a large lambing shed on the home farm which accommodates for some 600 ewes.
The majority of the Maguires’ sheep are based at an out farm a couple of miles adrift from the home and they experience few lambing problems, as the lambs are lively and quickly up and sucking.
“The best thing about the style that we’ve adopted here is that we’re practically selling every week, which means that it’s brilliant for cash flow,” Paul explained.
“The lowest time of year for selling lamb would be July and August and the rest of the year round we’re kept busy with it. We’d be doing around 50-60 lambs a week when we’re busy anyway.”
All things considered, it’s safe to say that Maguire Family Farms is not your average farms but for the past 30 years or so, under the direction of Paul and Thomas Maguire, they’ve been making it work.
“It’s not your typical sheep farm but it has great advantages,” Paul beamed. “There’s 40 individual pens here and we put 1,600 sheep through them, so that’s fairly good going and we can’t have any complaints at the minute.”
He concluded: “In order to run a good sheep farm, you need to have good fences and a good system in place, and most importantly you need to stick to that system.
“You have to know when your ewes are lambing too. The December lambs have to be lambing in December and not January, otherwise that system gets thrown off.
“In this particular line of work, you need to be very rigid and very discipline at the same time in order to make it work.”
Maguire Family Farm
Collon,
Co. Louth
Tel: 086 2639973
Taken from Irish Tractor & Agri magazine Vol 4 No 5, June 2016
