Burren farm blending tradition and a modern vision has plans to develop
Carina Roseingrave showing one of her pedigree cattle from her farm in Crusheen, Co Clare.
Mixing traditional with modern, mixed enterprise farmer Carina Roseingrave still has big plans for expansion and development.
Ms Roseingrave is a full-time mixed enterprise farmer in partnership with her brother Gerry at the foothills of the Burren in Crusheen, Co Clare.
Together, they milk around 100 cows and manage a herd of 50 pedigree sucklers, while Ms Roseingrave manages her hen egg business — Burren View Farm Eggs — on their 141ha farm and also manages a local after-school service.
Now a featured CAP Network Ireland case study of farming in Ireland, and with Ms Roseingrave featuring in the Network’s dedicated ‘Women in Agriculture’ booklet, the family farm showcases the combination of traditional land management practices with modern farm business development.
Ms Roseingrave recently participated in the Accelerating the Creation Of Rural Nascent Start-ups (Acorns) programme, which is designed to support early-stage female entrepreneurs living in rural Ireland, which helped to develop her egg business.
Ms Roseingrave has been farming for almost as long as she can remember, with the family farm being traditionally a suckler enterprise.
Her mother juggled the farm, her day job in Clare Marts in Ennis, and raising five children under the age of 12 when Ms Roseingrave’s father passed away in 2002.
Ms Roseingrave remembers herself and her siblings helping out wherever they could.
“We all did our bit over the years. Myself and Gerry were the most heavily involved, and we continued the farming,” she said.
The siblings, expanded to include dairy when they took over the farm from their mother and a neighbour offered to sell a block of land (51 ha) next door to the family farm.
Following a lot of investment into the infrastructure of the farm and the installation of a milking parlour and new shed, they were ready just before their heifers calved down and have now been in dairy for the past seven years.
The Roseingraves have since used the Targeted Agriculture Modernisation Scheme (Tams) supports to invest in a larger refrigerated bulk tank for their expanding dairy herd.
They also plan to avail of Ms Roseingrave’s presence in the partnership to apply for 60% support in the ‘Women Farm Capital Investment Scheme’ to build a modern shed for their suckler herd.
The suckler herd comprises pedigree Limousin and Charolais cows, and Ms Roseingrave is working towards breeding five-star bulls to sell.
Toffeepop, a bull from their herd, came second at the Tullamore Show in 2023 and in 2024, they bought a top pedigree Charolais cow whose sire was Jaquard, a former Scottish Highland show champion.
Since then, four successfully harvested Grade-1 embryos from this cow have been inseminated by top French bull Magicien and are now implanted into heifers from the dairy herd.
If successful, Ms Roseingrave hopes to breed a whole new line of top-quality Charolais genetics for the Irish market. The herd is currently registered in the Suckler Carbon Emission Programme (SCEP).
The Roseingraves also manage a 28 ha (70 acres) Special Area of Conservation native woodland on their farm. It had previously been managed under the Burren Life programme and is now registered in Acres.
In 2020, when Ms Roseingrave’s after-school business was forced to shut due to the pandemic, she decided to buy 50 hens.
“We were selling the eggs at home with an honesty box on the side of the road. The numbers started to double, triple, and get bigger. It has turned into a bit of a business now,” she explained.
By chance, Ms Roseingrave came across the Acorns programme while at the 2023 National Ploughing Championships, where she enrolled for the 2024/2025 programme.
In 2025, the programme celebrated 10 years of supporting early-stage female entrepreneurs.
Ms Roseingrave credits the programme for providing her with the assistance she needed to start running her farm like a business.
Ms Roseingrave’s plans for the farm as a whole are not finished yet, as she considers opportunities to sell milk directly to local customers and to eventually develop a farm tourism business.
When asked if she ever gets tired, the answer from Carina is a firm “no”; such is her enthusiasm for her farm and what she has achieved so far in partnership with her brother Gerry.
