Welcome to this special Focus on the Kerry Agribusiness Milk Quality and Sustainability awards, now in its fourth year of operation. The competition aims to identify and celebrate the success of the top-performing farmers, in terms of milk quality and sustainability among the 3,000 or so Kerry Agribusiness milk suppliers.

The awards recognise the long history that Kerry Agribusiness suppliers have of delivering quality milk to their creamery.

The region has a very strong dairy heritage and Kerry Agribusiness has a long history of working with its milk suppliers to ensure adoption of best practice initiatives.

“We are proud of our dairy heritage and these awards provide an opportunity to recognise the excellent quality and sustainability standards across our milk supplier farms.

“From a global perspective, our milk suppliers produce milk of the highest quality and in the most sustainable way and it’s important to recognise this. The farmers participating in the competition are best in class and we are very grateful to them for sharing insights into their management and experiences,” says Pat Murphy, CEO Kerry Dairy Ireland.

The awards have come about as a way for Kerry to recognise and highlight the exceptional quality and sustainability standards across its milk supplier farms.

Importance of sustainability

It recognises the perpetual importance of quality and ever-growing importance of sustainability.

This is especially important in light of the growing awareness around the importance of adoption of sustainability actions on-farm and quality metrics for continuous quality improvement.

Over the next few pages, each of the five contestants are profiled from across the catchment in Kerry, Limerick and Clare. We thank the farmers for opening their farms to the judges, for being so forthcoming with their information and for sharing the secrets to their success.

The judges this year are Ailish Moriarty, milk quality and sustainability lead with Kerry Agribusiness, Sean McCarthy, sustainability and services manager with Kerry Agribusiness, Brendan O’Neill, agriculture lecturer at Munster Technological University, and Aidan Brennan, representing the Irish Farmers Journal.

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on 13 August and will be featured again in the Irish Farmers Journal.