Based outside of Navan, Co Meath, Carn Hill Agri Ltd provides its customers with a full range of exceptional agricultural contracting services. Irish Tractor Agri & Plant caught up with proprietor Aidan Halligan to hear about its impressive machinery fleet in the yard at Alexanderaide (Alexander Reid), as well as the overall state of business at the moment.
The busy times continue at Carn Hill Agri Ltd where they’ve been servicing farmers throughout Co Meath and across its borders for more than two decades now.
Operating with five in its team, the company provides its customers with an array of agri contracting services, which includes pit silage, slurry, digger work, ploughing, tilling, sowing, spraying, harvesting, mowing, baling and wrapping, dump trailer work, drawing bales, road sweeping or anything else a farmer might request.
The man heading up the business is Aidan Halligan, a devoted agri contractor whose interest first piqued in this game back in the time when his late father Michael and uncles grew potatoes and corn in Alexanderaide.
Irish Tractor Agri & Plant spoke with Aidan recently to the discuss the ins and outs of the business – from the tractors and diggers in which he operates with to his hopes for Carn Hill Agri Ltd going forward.
“We have five tractors here at the minute. I bought a new Grasstec Zero Grazer and that does be very busy for us,” he stated.
“We have a three-and-a-half-thousand-gallon tanker with a dribble bar as well on it. We changed our set of pipes there and I have a new slurry pump coming there now in the next couple of weeks. It’s a Slurryquip.”
He added: “We’ve a New Holland, a Claas and three Deutz-Fahrs at the moment and we’re trying to see if we can get a few yokes paid for before we do anything else, to be honest. But, no, I’m not doing anything else now this year. I might buy another tractor maybe some stage along the line, but it won’t be a new tractor I’d buy. maybe a second hand one.”
Aidan’s first days of agri contracting himself date back to around 2003/04 and, since that time, he has built up a strong customer base through a combination of excellent work and reliability down through the years.
Right now, business is going well and the plan is to try and keep things that way for the foreseeable, according to Carn Hill Agri’s proprietor.
“Last year you had a tough wet spring. You were coming from 2023, you had a bad back end and work wasn’t done, and then the weather didn’t take up till nearly the middle of April of 2024, and, yeah, look, it wasn’t too bad,” he said.
“Summer was good enough. This year seems to be not too bad. We got very busy down in the back end of ‘24 with the Zero Grazer there, so that was out every day.
“We were doing maybe 10 to 12 loads a day for different people. So that’s good and then we had a bit of digger work done as well.
“The digger work was nearly constant, coming and going nearly the whole time. That’s not too bad of a little earner for us here.”
As for diggers, Carn Hill Agri buy theirs from Goff Agri & Plant Sales in Bridgetown, Co Wexford where they’ve also picked up a JCB teleporter and loading shovels in the past.
Aidan says he deals with Damian Goff directly when purchasing and says that the service is hard to beat.
“Damian’s a nice chap there. We got into a nice kind of friendship with him as well, and he has a good service there,” he said.
“It wouldn’t matter with Damian if it was day or night when you rang him, but just to ask him a problem or just to check over with something, and he’d be able to either sort you out over the phone or he’d have the part up to you the next day.
“It’s very hard to beat that. But no, that brand he’s selling now, we’d be very happy with it and we bought a JCB teleporter off him there a year ago or two years ago now. It’s a good wee machine.”
At the time of writing, Aidan and the team were busy in the silage season, cutting, baling and wrapping it “in between the showers”, as the Meath man put it.
Carn Hill Agri had also been immersed in digger work as well as slurry spreading, with Aidan combining it all with the small farm he operates which has 10 suckler cows on it.
This past May marked 10 years as a limited company for this agri contracting business, although it also coincides with a much more personal anniversary for the Halligan family.
“It’s probably a little milestone for us alright. My father’s dead 10 years as well, nearly a week before we started the limited company,” said Aidan.
“I’d have passed no remarks of the 10-year limited company started, but I’d be more interested in I can’t believe the father’s gone 10 years.
“Yeah, you’d be still waiting from him to appear around the corner, but, look, that’s just life. It’s a circle of life and you have to keep moving on, don’t you?”
Looking at the months ahead for Carn Hill Agri, Aidan says they’re eager to try and keep things going strong in Alexanderaide by providing customers with a service they know they can rely upon.
“Well sure, look, once you survive one year, you say, ‘oh sure, we’ll give it a go’, and ‘we’ll try another year’,” he pointed out.
“Every year you’re giving it up, and you say ‘no, there has to be an easier life’. ‘It has to be an easier way of making a few pound in it’, but then when it comes at Christmas and then turns around again, you say, ‘Ah, we’ll give it another try’. ‘Maybe next year it’ll be better’. There’s always going to be a better year.”
Carn Hill Agri Ltd,
Alexanderaide,
Navan,
Co Meath.
Tel: 046 9024050
Mobile: 086 8239189
First published in Irish Tractor & Agri magazine Vol 13 No 2, Autumn 2025
