Certified Angus Beef and Me - Lucy Collins
Certified Irish Angus Beef Schools Competition And What It Means To Grow Up On A Farm
As a child growing up on a farm surrounded by green fields, you naturally see amazing things from a very young age. By this I mean not many 5 year olds have seen the birth of a calf. I live on a dairy and beef farm about 15 minutes outside of Clonakilty. As the youngest of five children, you could say we are the stereotypical Irish Catholic family living in a rural community. Every summer, silage season was the highlight of it all. A bonding experience I like to call it. Cousins, uncles, neighbours. Up to all hours in the morning discussing the recent local gossip and the current affairs. Calving season in the cold months of January, February time has my parents and brother out longer in the yard and waking during the night to help aid the cow to calve. This is probably my favourite time of the year. The calves are such pets so my mother and I treat them like babies.Like a baby, you have to bottle feed the calf until it’s trained to by itself. It’s a hard time of year which I don’t think a lot of people in current times see. As I got older, I started to complain more about living on a farm as getting to training and seeing my friends between 5-7 o clock would cause friction with my parents. It was during lockdown that I realised how grateful I am to come from where I come from and to have a farm, because the industry is decreasing. I try to help out as much as I can, especially this year.
The Certified Irish Angus Schools Competition is run in association with its processing partners ABP and Kepak which aims to encourage second-level students to gain an understanding about the care and attention that is required to produce and market the highest quality Irish Angus beef for consumers. The initiative challenges groups of students to rear 5 Certified Irish Angus calves for 18 months and carry out research on a chosen topic.
From the start I wanted to do it but I was quite nervous since I didn’t know much about farming in great detail, only the general information. I thought I might as well put my name down since I have the land and extra time this year.
Our group was the last out of the three groups in the school to enter. To be honest,I’m still shocked that we ended up qualifying. We got the news that Laura Clancy, a past pupil and winner of the competition, was coming in to talk to the students interested in taking part in the competition about her own experiences and newfound ‘fame’. My friend, Aoife Whelton, who is also a farmer's daughter and aspiring vet, was the first message to be sent. It was an instant ‘Yes!’ Then my other good friend Deirdre O Neill happily agreed to help us out and share her expertise as a daughter of a local vet primary care in cows. Lastly, Amy Mc Carthy, who took a bit more convincing than the others.
‘ Will it take too much time ?’
‘ I don’t know anything about the competition’
Laura’s talk had us hooked from the get go. I just remember looking at Aoife and saying we are doing this. Laura is just so inspiring. At 24 years of age she has accomplished so much. We instantly started researching our project ideas and agricultural hot topics such as COP26. Caroline Walsh, a local female farmer who has won many awards over the years, was the inspiration for our project. Her farming is based on efficiency in farming methods. We did more research behind it and saw how it’s such a current subject. Having big numbers of Anguses is stereotypically seen as having more earning power, but half of that herd might not be as efficient as a smaller number of cattle. We made a list of areas and businesses associated with our topic and Certified Irish Angus and what we wanted to get out of the competition. We took pictures with Deirdre's own family Angus cows and shot our application video in school and at SuperValu.
It was around 2 or 3 weeks later we got an email congratulating us on making the 2nd round, interviews. I, unfortunately, could not make it due to being abroad at that time. The interviews were held in Limerick on the 20th of January. The girls called me after the interview and were over the moon with how it went.
Last week we were delighted to find out as a result from our interview we are one of over 30 groups that has been selected to go forward to the Certified Irish Angus Schools Competition Exhibition in Croke Park on 1st April 2022. There we will exhibit our project ideas to a number of judges and experts from the agri-food industry.
The judges will then select the final five groups that will receive the Angus calves at the National Ploughing Championships in September 2022 based on the combined performance by our group at the interview and at this event.
We are so excited to continue with our research and represent the school at this amazing event. We hope to qualify to the final round also but we are so proud of ourselves for making it this far and the competition.
Lucy Collins, TY Journalist
