A new €1 million state-of-the-art dairy calf research facility was officially opened at UCD Lyons Farm, Co. Kildare on Tuesday, February 25.

The new facility has the capacity to rear 180 dairy calves from birth up to five months of age and is designed to fulfil both research and commercial farming requirements, and demonstrate best practices in dairy calf rearing.

UCD president, professor Orla Feely described it as a "world-class Dairy Calf Education and Research Facility" and highlighted that the development was made possible through "the generous support of six industry partners".

The following companies and entities supported the development of the facility:

ABP Food Group;
Dairy Research Ireland;
FBD Trust;
JFC;
MSD;
Ornua.

The centre aims to apply cutting-edge research to benefit and improve the health and rearing of dairy calves.

UCD Lyons Farm manager Eddie Jordan gave an overview of the shed and said: "This building is allowing our calves approximately double the recommended lying space for calves."

The unit has a straw-bedded layback area to the rear and a slatted area to the front covered with rubber slat mats. To the rear of the straw-bedded area is an outdoor area fenced with a wood-chip surface where calves can be given access to an outdoor area.

At the feed face is the milk-feeding stations, water drinkers, and concentrate as well as roughage feeding stations.

All feeds consumed by each calf can be monitored on an individual basis.

Under the slatted area is a four-foot-deep tank with a sump at each end to collect all effluent from the shed.

There are 20 individual calf pens for newborn calves to spend their first few days in before they join the group pens.

As well as this, there is a training pen serviced by an automatic milk feeder to train calves on to the robotic calf feeder.

There is also a viewing gallery to allow groups to view the facility for research and education purposes.

UCD lecturer Dr. Alan Kelly said: "The shed has been equipped with very high-end ag tech so we can essentially monitor every movement from an intake and behaviour aspect of the calf, right through from pre- and post-weaning and out to pasture.

"This is the first facility worldwide to monitor greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in calves."

ABP Food Group is a project partner and, speaking to Agriland at the official opening of the facility, ABP agri-sustainability manager Stephen Connolly said: "ABP has a long history working with UCD with the long-term grazing platforms and this is a continuation of that. We formerly reared the calves and brought them to beef, this gives us an extra level of data on the calves.

"Secondly, we have over 13,000 farmer suppliers and we feel dairy calf to beef integration is very important so the research and knowledge transfer to our farmers from this is going to hopefully help their farm efficiency and sustainability.

"As I say, every dairy farmer is a beef farmer and we need a sustainable dairy industry to have a sustainable beef industry," Connolly said.

Also speaking to Agriland at the official opening, JFC group CEO, John F. Concannon, said: "JFC is delighted to be one of the sponsors of this project as in we supplied the equipment for feeding calves.

"It's great for us to have a machine in a facility like this, there are thousands of machines in the Irish and English market at the moment, but to have a machine where there's research done, that's going to make a difference to us.

"Seeing is believing, you can see relaxed calves, the machine is working well the calves are content," Concannon concluded.