Gearoid O’Leary is farming in Coolderrihy, Kilmichael with his wife Caitriona and their four children Anna, Barra, Saoirse and Sean. When you enter their farm, you get a real sense of the true meaning of a family farm; all hands are on deck, available and willing to help.

They are running a suckler to weanling beef system consisting of 66 continental cows with a split calving system of Spring and Autumn. Charolais & Limousin stock bulls are used as well as a small amount of AI. Their calving interval is 386 days and 0.99 calves per cow per year.

The split autumn and spring calving system spreads out the workload of calving and also the cashflow by having weanlings to sell at different times of the year. Weanlings are sold through the mart. For autumn calving most of the cows calve themselves outside. 

They have a mobile calving camera set up to assist with watching for calving and this has become a very useful technology on the farm. Cows and calves are weighed to measure performance and last year their calves averaged a 200-day weight of 239kgs and achieved an average daily gain of 0.96kgs
per day.   

They are also farming a sheep enterprise consisting of 54 Suffolk X ewes lambing in March/April and lambs are sold through the mart in September. The beef and sheep enterprises are working well together. While it can make grassland management more challenging during the spring they complement each other for the remainder of the year.

Gearoid and Caitriona are very passionate about producing as much of their own food as possible from their farm for feeding their family. They always have their home-produced beef and lamb in the freezer and grow their own crop of potatoes, vegetables and fruits. This passion has been passed down to their eldest daughter Anna, who has set up her own food business known as The Flour Patch.

Gearoid O’Leary and his daughter Anna.

Anna studied Culinary Arts in MTU and having worked in a number of food businesses while in college; after graduating she took the leap of faith to make her own career from producing food locally. 

As previously featured in The Southern Star, the Flour Patch is an honesty box in two different locations selling home baked goods such as scones, brown bread, cakes, tarts, cookies etc. You drive up to the honesty box and take what you want, pay in cash or Revolut and its often sold out quiet quickly.

When seasonally available the honesty box sells home grown vegetables grown in their polytunnel and homemade jams, pickled cucumber and honey produced in their own on farm beehives. For her baking ingredients Anna uses Bo Bainne Ur milk produced by local dairy farm Mike Cahalane and she sources her eggs from Sean Hayes.

The first honesty box opened in Castlefreak where Anna lives with her partner (Eircode P85XH10). This honesty box is open from 10am on Saturday and Sundays.  The second box is on her home farm in Kilmichael  and is open at 10am on Sundays (Eircode P12DR02). Anna is also very busy baking cakes for occasions such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries etc.

Anna is gathering momentum on social media platforms Tik Tok and Instagram where she posts on a variety of topics such as day-to-day farm tasks, baking, cooking family dinners etc.  Search the name ChefAnnaJane on social media. Just recently The Flour Patch has won Innovator of the Year for Munster in the Irish Restaurant
Awards.

It’s great to see a home cooked meal with all the food on the plate produced on the farm, zero food miles and sustainability. In a time when consumers are getting more conscious about where their food is coming from it is an ideal opportunity to take a leaf out of the O’ Leary’s book and try as grow as much food yourself as possible.

– Áine O’ Riordan is a dry stock farm advisor based in Macroom Teagasc Office.