The Dealer got talking to a Cork dairy farmer at the Ballyvadin dairy beef farm last week who seemed very down in the dumps.

The reason for his melancholy wasn’t that he was leaving the level, fertile plains of Tipperary to go back to the hills of west Cork. Instead, it was that beef farmers have such a fine facility as a demonstration farm, while dairy farmers have nothing.

Between Tullamore Farm, Newford and now Ballyvadin, beef farmers have three sources of impartial, farm-scale data to follow while dairy farmers have no such demonstration farm, despite all the challenges that sector faces.