‘Fully functioning’ 160ac West Wicklow dairy farm for €1.5-1.7m’. Irish Independent. 23/04/24.

Large dairy farms are beginning to find their way on to the market, and a 160ac holding in the strong farming area of West Wicklow with an extensive range of outbuildings is guided at €1.5-1.7m.

Owners Mervyn and Dorothy Fairbrother are retiring and took the first steps in the process recently when they sold the dairy herd and the silage at auction in Carnew.

The farm was originally bought by Dorothy’s father in 1958 and she took over with Mervyn in 1994.

Now that the children are reared, and having done their calculations, they decided to sell up.

Dorothy told RTÉ’S Countrywide: “Since we made the decision to sell and change career paths, whatever that may be, I’ve been a much happier person.”

Selling the land and the farmstead is the next step. The property is 2km from Rathdangan, 10km north of Hacketstown and 12km west of Baltinglass, near the border with Carlow and Kildare.

The farm is divided by the road (giving plenty of frontage): the house, sheds and outbuildings on 43ac on one side; and the remaining 117ac on the other.

The traditional stone-built farmhouse was extended in recent years and could be split into two homes, as it has two entrances, two kitchens and separate living areas.

Other spaces include a dining room, a conservatory, two utility rooms and an ensuite bedroom on the ground floor. There are five more bedrooms upstairs.

The farmyard incorporates a fully equipped dairy operation that includes a 12-unit Dairymaster milking machine, automatic feeders fed from a loft, a cattle crush and holding pen, and two cubicle sheds accommodating 42 cubicles.

There are also three slatted sheds — one with a feeding passage, two calving boxes, an isolation pen, three meal bins with a 5t, 10t and 12t capacity — a nine-bay cubicle shed with feeding troughs and automatic scrapers, and a concrete yard with an open silage wall.

There is also a four-column free-standing shed a 360,000gal slurry tower, a workshop, a garage, a pump house and a generator house.

The farmland is all in grass and laid out for dairying in fenced paddocks serviced by internal roads with a piped and a natural water supply. The lands are all in grass and have both a piped and natural water supply.

Auctioneer David Quinn describes it as “a fully functioning dairy farm that was well minded”.

While the bulk of the holding is in good grazing ground, a 40ac portion is not of the same quality as the rest.

It will be sold at online auction at 12 noon on May 14 and can be bought as an entire or in three lots.

The first lot is made up of the house, yard and outbuildings on 43.6ac guided at €700,000.

The second is 76ac of grazing land guided at €10,000/ ac, while the third is 41ac portion of lesser ground guided at €6,000 to €7,000/ac.

This article was written by Jim O’Brien.