Shiely selling former Cork home

Shiely must now be assimmilated in Co Kilkenny, as he has put his home farm, at Madore, Drimoleague, up for sale with John Hodnett, of Hodnett Forde, who also sold another farm, at Smorane, Skibbereen, for the intensive dairy farmer.
The home, near Caheragh, is a residential dairy farm with 120 acres and a range of good quality outbuilidngs, including a modern milking parlour and a location off the main Skibbereen/Bantry road.
Demand for land is still strong, without too much price inflation, so it’s likely the sale of this farm will match the circa €11,000 per acre that Shiely paid for the Castle Annaghs estate.
Hodnett is quoting €11,000 to €12,000 per acre for the land, which can be offered in three lots or the entire, he says.
Hodnett hints that offers may already have been forthcoming, but local farmers will know of the quality of the land and some will have been fence-sitting in anticipation of a sale.
The property is in good order, Hodnett says, with a fine, traditional farmhouse at its centre and a large yard with top-class buildings and a working layout that just needs tidying up and it’s ready-to-go.
The grassland is laid out in large paddocks, with a central farm roadway and extensive road frontage.
The main house is a two-storey, four-bed and is in walk-in condition and the yard includes a 16-unit parlour, slatted housing, cubicle sheds, (with 150-head capacity), calf pens, two covered silos, open silo and other machinery and storage sheds.
Unusually, the farm has a cattle underpass, which was built by its owner, and links land on the other side of a road.
The farm is being offered in the entire — which includes the house, yard and 120 acres, and in three other lots.
These include lot A, which comprises 69 acres; lot C, which comprises 24 acres; and lot B, which comprises 26 acres.
Selling in lots is made viable by the amount of road frontage and it’s also a good way of sharing-out scarce land acquisition in an intensive dairying area, so if the competition is there this farm should sell fast and sell well.
Liam Shiely has also sold another property, at Dunbeacon, Durrus, and trumped the prospective buyers at auction, back in June of 2009, when he scooped the Castle Annaghs estate in Co Kilkenny for €6.07m.
The Caheragh dairy farmer joked when he acquired that 550-acre estate that his Cork cows would have to be held separately over the winter, and be let out against the Kilkenny herd in the spring.
At the time, the sheer size of the property was the talk of west Cork and, despite farming considerable acreage, the talk was that Shiely might have bitten off more than he could chew.
It’s obvious now he didn’t, and with sons ready to share the job of farming, the concentration on one estate makes sense.
Shiely said that farming the 550-acre period estate would be easier than what he had been doing with a number of fragmented holdings.
The Castle Annaghs farm was bought after a shrewd assessment of its worth — and Shiely said it had a perfect land base, location and aspect.
The estate is bounded on two sides by the Barrow and had sold for more than €16m, for an integrated golf scheme, in 2008, the year before Shiely bought it.
The 550-acre estate was sold by its German trust owners and had been run by a management team since the 1960s.
The crash intervened and Bord Pleanala scuppered development, and the estate went to auction,
The reduced price, of €7m, made the property, a model farm in its own right, accessible, and there were just six farmer bidders in the fray.
Despite describing himself as “small fry”, Liam Shiely won the day and bought the property for the equivalent of €11,000 per acre — a high figure by average land standards, but more than fair for a property of Castle Annaghs standard.
“I hope that Castle Annaghs will prove itself as an efficient dairy farm,” said Shiely, “and if it doesn’t, it’ll show that the dairy industry as a whole is in trouble.”
But as it turned out, the dairy industry was only warming up for a sustained expansionary period, that doesn’t yet look like abating.
The demand for land should see his old farm past the post with a decent run,