Cavan farmer focused on improving soil health and increasing nutrition for cattle

Jane Shackleton may come from travel-loving stock – Antarctic explorer Ernest was a relation and she has travelled widely herself – but her feet are firmly planted in Cavan.

Together with parents Jonathan and Daphne, she farms the family’s 80-hectare holding on the shores of Lough Mullagh.

It’s a picturesque spot on the Cavan-Meath border which she describes, in farmerly fashion, as “the start of Drumlin country, or free draining hills”.

Shackleton is a third-generation female farmer, though she objects to the epithet. “I’m not a female farmer, I’m a farmer,” she says.

Always interested in the land, she studied geography at Trinity and, after college, worked her way around the world including stints on farms in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Organic

She came home to an office job in Dublin and survived it only because it enabled her to pursue her interest at the time: competitive rowing.

Five years ago she came home to work the farm, which her mother Daphne, an experienced stockwoman and landscape gardener, had turned organic in 1998. Her father Jonathan, who leads expeditions to the Antarctic, specialises in agroforestry, developing the farm’s woodlands.

The family produces organic beef. To its original Aberdeen Angus herd, Shackleton, who is currently studying for a doctorate in agriculture at UCD, has added a new breed, Belted Galloways.

“We wouldn’t be intensive farmers, we operate on a low-input system and we like biodiversity,” she explains.

“That means we don’t feed any concentrates or grains and the cows stay out for as much of the winter as possible, depending on the weather.”

Like the Aberdeen Angus, Belted Galloways are very hardy, she points out. “We’ve chosen our breeds to suit the land type. Both breeds also provide exceptional meat quality with high marbling,” she says, referring to those prized thin lines of fat that add flavour to meat.

The suckler and beef system she operates means calves are born and kept on the farm all of their life. “The only time they go in a trailer is when they go to the factory,” she explains.

They don’t feed grain because she believes that, as ruminants, cows do better on a diet of grass in summer and hay and silage – cut from their pastures – in winter.

But if you think pastures here refer to acres of bright green grass, think again.

Shackleton’s PhD, which she is taking in conjunction with animal feed company Devenish, looks at the benefits of multi-species swards. It means that instead of having just grass in a field – “a monoculture and monocultures don’t exist in nature” – she plants a variety of herbs and legumes, such as tasty – for cows anyway – red clover.

Woodland

Her studies aim to show how much doing so can improve soil health, reduce the need for fertiliser and increase nutrition for cattle.

It means her own cattle get to enjoy picking bits and pieces in what is the bovine equivalent of a varied diet, one closer to that which nature intended.

Thanks to her father’s work planting up acres of woodland on the farm, including oak, birch, larch, ash, hazel, Scots pine and Norway spruce, the planet gets a good carbon soak and her cattle get an enriched environment.

“It’s lovely to see them browse the trees, eating ivy and leaves, having a good scratch and performing their natural behaviours,” she says.

That bright green grass that stands out most in Ireland’s 40 shades is the result of nitrogen fertilisers spread on the land, she points out.

Shackleton hopes to show that nitrogen can be pulled from the air and into the earth instead, using her clovers and legumes as conduits. That provides not just better-quality grazing but greater biodiversity, including among pollinators and worms.

“You don’t need the chemical input and the animal performance is much better too,” she says.

That’s worth remembering when you go to the supermarket. “The more demand there is for organic food, the more farmers can go organic,” she says.