Raised By The Village - and Team Hynes!

Karl stayed with the Hynes family for a week as part of the RTÉ show 'Raised By The Village'. Picture: RTÉ

It's been a busy few months for the family, and we can now reveal that we will be  back on the TV screens later this month  with the opening episode of the new season of 'Raised By The Village', a series where troublesome teens are placed in the countryside to live with a family and become part of a tight-knit community. 

We had a wonderful young man named Karl, who hails from Mullingar, stay with us. For those of you who know us and follow us in the column here you'll know this truly is a cow-mad household. Meanwhile, Karls's obsession was gameworld - so we knew from the first meeting that we would be in for an interesting week.

The premise for the show is that it features two urban families who need major help sending their teenagers to the heart of the countryside to see life from a different perspective.

Now, I don’t want to give too much away, so you'll have to tune in to see if Karl shared our passion for cows, but I can tell you there were some fun moments. The programme airs  on Sunday, March 24  at 6:30pm on RTÉ ONE and you will also be able to catch the four-part series on RTÉ Player.

A trip across the water

But that's not the only excitement this week. As I am writing this, I am just about to head to Cork airport so we can catch a late-night flight out to Manchester and then grab the early morning train to Carlisle as Georgie is also showing at Borderway UK Dairy Expo in Carlise.

Becky has travelled up from Devon with Molly Westwood as they have been hard at work these last few weeks preparing the team of heifers for the show. Georgie will be showing Panda Alpha O Kiwi RC in the Autumn heifer class and also her showmanship class. 

I’m excited to catch up with Panda Rita Ora RC, whom we haven’t seen for a while; she is a heifer we own in partnership with Panda Holsteins and Becky. She is sired by Army and backed by 21 generations of excellent classification cows from the Golden Rose cow family. Her dam is housed in the US and has won at two major shows there. 

Becky will be on the halter with Rita Ora and will also use her in the showmanship class along with showing some other heifers for Molly. Georgie will also get a chance to catch up with Ravina, her jersey heifer in Scotland. 

Ravina is moving yards this weekend as she begins her show career. Unfortunately, she won't be in the show ring at Carlisle as we had decided against entering her in case blue tongue restrictions were lifted. She will now compete at some summer shows in the UK and aim at the All-Breeds All-Britain calf show in the autumn. 

It will be nice to see sister act back competing at a show together and classes are big in Carlisle, but unfortunately, Pete can’t travel, so he will be home alone catching the show on live stream.

The continuous rain is making life difficult on the farm so it is imperative he stays at home to manage the cows as they are really milking well at the moment, protein is holding at 3.40% and fat at 4.25% delivering over 2kg of milk solids. 

We have been grazing the cows every day, but they are inside on cubicles at night with a diet of silage and wheat straw. I always think one of the main signs of how cows are being fed or underfed in the spring is how many cows are coming in heat.

Cows won’t cycle if there is a nutritional issue or they are losing too much body condition and we are seeing groups in heat every day now, a bit of worry when they are housed at night in case a cow gets hurt but the herd should be set up nicely for breeding season.

We synchronized a group of heifers this week; they have been out grazing for a month now and despite the weather, they are in super condition. It is always crucial to get heifers on a level diet for a minimum of a month before breeding. They are getting fed a high-energy ration daily, and we will continue this until after they are bred, even if the weather improves. The majority are being served to sexed semen. 

As soon as we arrive home from Carlisle, we will start giving Pete a hand to prepare the maiden heifers we are selling; they are being sold at a special sale in Bandon Mart on Thursday, March 21.

They really are a super group of heifers, we fed them well over the winter to ensure they are on target for breeding and the majority of them have EBIs up around 290, all AI bred, one thing is for sure, they will make great cows for whoever buys them.

Thankfully, we have more orders for calves to go direct to beef farms, and the workload has been somewhat reduced, with 25 calves leaving the farm last weekend.

It was such a pleasure to have two happy customers in the yard and see how impressed with the calves they were collecting. It was even nicer to get a call from one of the customers two days later to order another batch of calves which will leave in ten days' time.