A cow and her calf in a pen on Cork farmer Ger McSweeney's farm outside Millstreet
"The margins were not there at what I was doing part-time, selling calves as weanlings. Only the few very good ones were making money, mostly Limousin calves. So I took the chance to look at the whole thing.
"From a science point of view, things were improving off farm, with the Better Farm Programme. I had a lot of interest in it and was lucky to get involved in back in 2018 and that really helped focus the mind."
In 2018 when Ger went farming full-time, he had just over 30 cows in the herd, which he had been building up since 2013. "The plan was to keep increasing the numbers every year gradually while in the background I was trying to get a lot of basics right."