€5m guide for farm

YOU would need more than a lottery win to buy a good farm nowadays as one of the best known dairy farms in the country shows - it comes with a guide price of €5m.

Auctioneer Christy Buckley has listed one of the biggest farm sales in Co Cork for some time, that of the Lynch family at Ballynoe, Ballyfeard.

The farm featured in the pages of the Farmer’s Journal, as part of Liz Kavanagh’s column. She is the mother of vendor Fiach Lynch.

With 166 acres of grassland and a whopping 153,635 gallons of milk quota, the farm will attract serious farmers and serious money. But the buyers are out there, says the selling agent.

He has had a few walking the land already, some of them from beyond Munster.

Being close to the sea this is an early grass farm, with stock also grazing into late autumn and early winter.

The farm is a modern, one-man operation, with the yard centrally placed and farm roadways radiating out to the entire block.

A non-residential property, it has frontage onto three roads and is located within a short drive of Carrigaline, towards Kinsale.

An option for a new owner is to build a house on the land, and to work with the monitors in the farmyard, which was built around 10 years ago and is right up to modern standards, says Mr Buckley, with a 16-unit, computerised milking parlour, 110-cow cubicle house, automatic scrapers and central feed passage.

There’s a range of large calving houses, slatted sheds, a workshop-store and an overhead office area, which makes the yard a self-contained workspace. A nice addition is an enclosed, safe children’s play area.

The yard has a collection area and crush and two large silage pits, while slurry is separated and the liquid used in a paddock irrigation system.

The farm has good quality level land in an area that also has a number of large tillage farms. One part of the farm has a little rough grazing around a glen, and part of this is under forestry, but the remainder is in large, level paddocks.

As a state-of-art dairy farm, the Ballynoe property is a turnkey proposition, and while the guide price covers the land and yard, there is the option to buy the stock and equipment as well, says Mr Buckley.

The last large farm to sell in the area was a 350 acre tillage farm at Minane Bridge, belonging to the family of the late Hugh Coveney, TD.

It made a record-breaking €17,000 per acre, or €6 million in 2003 through auctioneer Joe McCarthy of Irish and European.