I farm: “400ac of predominantly arable land with my father, Michael. We are growing spring peas, spring barley, spring beans and winter wheat this year.”

New system: “We would have been Teagasc Green Book farmers. We operated a one-pass system to establish crops. In the autumn of 2018, we direct-drilled some beans and that worked well. In the autumn of 2019, we direct-drilled winter wheat. We did about 10% of the farm then. After that we moved the whole farm into no-till/min-till production. We haven’t ploughed since.”

Livestock: “The next step was to throw in livestock. We have a couple of ewes that we lamb every year and we have 900 laying hens. They graze cover crops, a multispecies patch and the headlands of an arable field.”

Sprays: “Our normal spray programme, without nutrition, is that we’d only go for one single fungicide, which would be a T2 for flag leaf, that’s the most important one to mind. We reduced nitrogen usage to 90 to 100 units for spring crops and we’re back to 110 to 120 units for winter crops.”

Yields: “We’re back to our average yields here. We never grew 5t/ac crops anyway. We’ll be averaging 4t/ac on winter wheat and between 2.5t/ac and 3t/ac on a very good crop of spring barley.”

This year: “No amount of infiltration in the world would have taken the wet winter and wet spring that we just had. It was hardship. With this system you can’t go mucking or mauling at ground or you go backwards. We’ve learned to be patient.”

Farm event: “I’m holding a BASE Ireland farm show on Thursday 4 July here on the farm. It’s open to the public, farmers and educators. Anyone who has an interest or is thinking about even making a move to a different system.”

Quotable quote: “I’m enjoying farming, I don’t think I would have stayed farming if we stayed the way we were going.”