“If we’re going to stay farming, sure we have to do this. There’s nothing major in the whole thing.”

Conor Roche on signing up for the Waters of LIFE pilot agri-environmental programme.

The Roche family hosted a farm walk on July 29th to chat about robotic milking systems and how a water quality initiative can be a good fit for a dairy farmer. Over 80 locals were in attendance.

There was no specific link between robotic milking and water quality, except our understanding that these types of events need to appeal to a wide range of interests and people are still on a bit of a journey with water quality.

It was a great turnout, Conor, Alec and James Roche led the tour and spoke about their farm’s development and their milking set up.

This is the Shournagh sub-catchment, starting just north of Cork City and taking in Tower, Vicarstown, Berrings, Courtrback and Firmount and up to Donoughmore around the Shournagh and Sheep rivers. There are around 300 farmers in this area and Dairy would be the main enterprise type.

So Waters of LIFE Catchment Scientist Diarmuid McSweeney walked through a scenario of what it might look like for a dairy farmer coming into the Waters of LIFE programme for Year 2 and 3.

• If a farmer had:
• 100m of mapped stream
• 1 hectare of high quality habitat
• Came into the programme for 2 years,
• Did the training
• Was willing to do their bit for nature

There are clear benefits to water quality which translate into participation, equipment and action payments for the farmer.

We had a number of supporting actions on show and after the presentations were done, it was time for the one-to-one chats which are often the difference between farmers coming into the programme or not. Recruitment for a programme like this happens one farmer at a time.

If you’d like to know more, get in touch.