Down has always been a trailblazer when it comes to securing All-Ireland titles so it was hardly a major surprise when a dairy farm from the Mourne County became Northern Ireland’s first recipient of the prestigious National Farmyard Award. The honour went to Hillcrest Farm in Dromore and we caught up with Beattie Lilburn, who heads this outstanding family enterprise, to find out more.
In September of this year, the Lilburn farmyard in Dromore, County Down was announced as the overall winner of the 2017 National Farmyard Award – the first enterprise from north of the border to scoop this prestigious prize. Hillcrest Farm is a large, family-run dairy business, overseen by Beattie and Margaret Lilburn in conjunction with their sons David and Reggie
The Lilburns farm 500 acres, 350 of which are owned, milking a herd of 250 Holstein Friesian cows in a winter milk system. All of the milk goes to Strathroy Dairy Ltd. in Omagh and almost half of it is produced from quality grass and forage. The farmyard has been designed with great care and imagination to accommodate the scale of the operation now in place.
Hillcrest Farm generates employment for one man full-time plus an additional three part-time workers. When he learned that his enterprise had been selected from a field of very strong competition to garner the 2017 FBD National Farmyard Award, Beattie was both humbled and delighted:
“It was nice to win it, not least because this is very much a family business,” he notes. “There have been three generations of our family on this particular farm – I’m second generation and Reggie and David are third. It’s in our blood and dairy is what we’ve always focussed on.”
As well as striving to produce high-quality milk as efficiently and sustainably as possible, the Lilburns also regard safety as a main priority. To this end, all slurry tanks have outside mixing points with safety guards fitted and slurry bug treatment reduces the amount of gas emitted. Thought has been put into the design of cattle-handling facilities to allow for smooth cow flow and operator safety at all times.
The farm has been in the Countryside Management Scheme for ten years and the Lilburns have planted 200 trees and 2,000 metres of hedging, while coppice planting is employed to increase wildlife activity on the farm.
Going back to the genesis of Hillcrest Farm, Beattie continues: “My father, William, purchased the farm in the early ‘40s and he started with 63 acres here. He had a wee 30-acre farm before that, as well, so it went up to around 90 acres. The farm was expanded and gradually passed on from father to son and I have now reached the stage myself where my own sons are making the major decisions. Reggie is at home full-time and David is here part time as well as working in machinery sales with Northern Excavators. He’s here helping out every morning before he goes to work and he’s very much part of the team.”
First milking is at 6am and second is at 5pm, with each taking approximately two hours in a double-sided 14-unit milking parlour. Beattie has been running an exclusively pedigree Holstein herd “for a long time” and has no intention at the moment of expanding beyond the 250-cow mark:
“I’m reasonably happy with the size of the operation and have no plans to expand the cow numbers,” he confirms. “We’ll consolidate the size and try to make things even better. There’s no room for complacency in this business – you can always get better”
Winning the Farmyard of the Year Award would suggest that there’s not much room for improvement, however… “I’ve admired those winning farms in The Farmer’s Journal over the years and I knew from the calibre of those farms that it was a very tough ask to win that award,” says Beattie. “That’s what encouraged me to enter and I was pleasantly surprised on the day – down at the Ploughing Championships – to learn that we had won. It’s the first time it’s been won by anybody from the North, so it’s historic and it was nice to win an All-Ireland for Down because we are probably overdue one!”
Regarding yields, the amiable Down man continues: “We average about 8,700 litres off two tonne of cake. Grassland management is a big thing here and we take a lot of milk off forage. Butterfat is 4.2 and protein 3.4. It’s good quality milk with a low somatic cell count from 80-150 and TBC [total bacteria count] under ten all the time.
“All of the feeding and fertility records are kept on computer now and it makes the job a little bit easier. Programs for cow management are a big plus … we use the Kingswood one.
“I’m very much into grazing – they go out in mid-March and we’d normally keep them out until October. I like to have the cows out. Most of our land is around the farm and we have an excellent infrastructure here, with a very good network of laneways and tracks.
“We’re mostly autumn-calving … we start on the first of September and go up to Christmas, with nothing after the end of March.”
The Lilburns do all their own ploughing and fieldwork. They grow 150 acres of cereal (winter barley and wheat), the majority of which goes into their own feed. Anything left over in the summertime is sold to local millers. “We grow 40-50 acres of wheat for whole crop, which gives us a nice rotation – grass for six or seven years and then cereal for three years, and it’s a nice cycle,” says Beattie.
Looking to the future, sustainability is high on Beattie’s list of priorities: “We aim to improve the farm and also to improve our land and the countryside. We want to have a sustainable business for the future. We won’t be entering into any major expansion mode; it’s very much a family business first and foremost and we’re happy to keep it that way.”
As for the ongoing challenge of keeping the enterprise commercially viable, the Down man concludes: “Obviously, you need a little bit more money coming in than going out. If you can stay profitable in the down years, then you will survive. We do costings every month. We’re very much aware of our costings and we keep on top of it. Jason McMinn of FarmGate Consultancy Ltd. looks after that for us.
“You have to keep an eye on the ball and make sure you have a steady cash flow all year around. We run our own fleet of tractors – five New Hollands – and do all our own drilling, ploughing and seeding etc. Everything is done in-house except combine work. We bought a new silage harvester in September and have all our own silage gear. There are a lot of overheads and a lot of labour involved, too, so you have to factor it all into your calculations and make sure you are getting something out of it for yourself.”
Hillcrest Farm
204 Ballygowan Road,
Dromore,
County Down.
BT25 1RQ.
Tel: 028 9269 2260
Taken from Irish Tractor & Agri magazine Vol 5 No 8, December 2017/January 2018
