 Down South and Down under with Mark Beattie  |
Down South and Down under with Mark Beattie
Mark Beattie, Final year HND in Agriculture, Greenmount Campus writes:My name is Mark Beattie, I’m on my third year of the Higher National Diploma in Agriculture at Greenmount. I’m the current President of the Student Council at the college. I’m the friendly representative face for students and I have to chair meetings and help organise the charity links for the council, like Children in Need and the NFU Africa Appeal. On my second year I went on placement to New Zealand. I was out there for six months working in the Canterbury Plains along with seven or eight others. I was staggered by the sheer size of the outfit; there were 1000 head of Jersey cross cattle. We were milking 50 head at a time in a swing-over parlour starting at 5 am each morning to get finished by 9am and then on at 2 pm in the afternoon until 5 pm. When I finished my placement the owners were planning to expand the herd to 2500 cattle! I’m really glad I didn’t have to milk them! What I noticed about the New Zealanders was they had a hard business view of the operation. They’d have a consultant in to look at the business figures and they’d often go in for “share-milking” where they’d have a partner in the business who might not know the first thing about farming but did know about finance. They were also very keen on managing the grass and this was something I noticed when we did a weeks’ exchange recently with students from Kildalton College in Kilkenny in the South of Ireland. Myself and 15 others from Greenmount went south and 16 Kildalton students came to Greenmount. When I was there I saw a few similarities with what I saw in New Zealand; the farmers were sharp when it came to managing grass for cattle, and they had a passion for the business. In the South they would sooner spend an afternoon in the office checking on the business figures rather than spend it looking at cattle chewing the cud. I came away from Kildalton with a more open-minded view of farming and dairy cows. At the end of the day I really enjoyed seeing a new part of Ireland with a different climate and ground and we were really well looked after.
Kildalton Exchange
New Zealand experiences
Mark Beattie (middle) with fellow students Robert McConaghy (left) and Andrew Callighan (right) on the piste in New Zealand |
