Professional Work Experience - Behind the Scenes

As part of our Professional Work Experience within our Animal and Crop Production degree we are given the opportunity to travel to any part of the world to experience the different types of work systems within various agricultural sectors. Whether we carry it out it ten minutes down the road from our home or at the other side of the globe the college facilitates everyone’s wants. Because of this flexibility offered, we came to the decision to travel to Dustin Hawkins’ Tillage and Beef Farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. In November of third year we decided to begin the process of organising the work period in Canada, ultimately on the basis that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and asked ourselves “why not go?”

Upon organising the placement we realised that Dustin had taken many UCD students for years before us and had maintained and excellent relationship with the college and people always. We contacted the students that were here last year before finalising everything and they didn’t have a bad word to say about any of the people or the work out here at all. Through contacting the students from last year, and Dustin himself, we booked our flights for the last week in April and to return at the beginning of July (a ten week stint), as this time best suit the farming system in relation to the workload and need for labour.

We landed in Regina and got collected by Dustin and his family. They were immediately very
welcoming and it was noticeable how Dustin knew the process involved in settling in as three Irish
lads on the other side of the Atlantic. After arriving we began working two days later. The weather
was favourable when we landed, with ground conditions being ideal to begin seeding. The scale of the machinery then came into perspective as soon as we began. We were operating 132 foot
sprayers, 90 foot seeders and 51 foot land rollers while seeding. This scale was definitely required with 13500 acres to be seeded in the short spring period. The crops sown varied between durum wheat, lentils, barley and oilseed rape/canola. The weather hardly broke for the full sowing period and we got all ground seeded in three weeks. The total area farmed including winter crops is 19000 acres. Aside from the actual operation of the machinery, we were maintaining and changing parts on a large variety of machines to be used later in the year after seeding, including large combines and swathing machines. 

The scale of everything on the machinery front, from the lorry outfits pulling seed and fertilizer to the tractors pulling both seeders, is something that we would simply not get the opportunity to see, let alone operate back home.

After seeding had finished our focus shifted toward the beef enterprise. There were 750 suckler
cows and heifers to calve and which had to be hauled out to pastures using large lorry trailers and
jeeps. Predominantly Angus and Simmental stock are reared on the farm. Excluding the obvious
large number of animals, with over 1400 animals on farm near the end of calving, the distances
between land blocks was a tough concept to comprehend at the start. For example there was a land block 150 kilometres from the home block that we were hauling to. It was a 4 hour round trip just to drop some cows out to grass to calve, which would be unheard of at home. Once all the animals were drew out to the pastures, which between all blocks allotted to nearly 10000 acres, we began fencing maintenance of all the blocks. We checked the livestock often as all cows were close to calving and these checks were essential. To see all the livestock it took a full day, again due to the distances between blocks. The weather was again favourable for the cows calving outside and it was interesting to see how cows and calves can thrive in a less intensive model than the conventional suckler system at home.

We are now eight weeks in to the placement and this week we will begin the calf work. This involves rounding up the calves into the pens firstly and then tagging, branding, castration, vaccination and the implanting a growth hormone commences. The branding of the calves is something we never would have seen before, with Dustin’s initials marked onto each of the calves’ sides. This drove home how different the attitude is from home with no governmental involvement, tagging or registration carried out whatsoever.

To conclude, we would advise anybody that is considering our course as an option or is deciding on where to travel on Professional Work Experience to not hesitate to travel to Canada or anywhere abroad for this entire experience. 

With only two weeks left of our time over here now we can hardly believe how fast our time here
has gone by. We have genuinely enjoyed every part of the experience so far when while working and on our time off. No day was the same, with the tasks and people varying every day, whether we were working with each other, Dustin’s family or the other staff. Everyone was very welcoming and easy to work with. Although Kincaid is remote, no evening or day off went by that we didn’t have something different to do. Dustin has provided us with a vehicle for whenever we wanted to travel anywhere on our time off.

To conclude, we would advise anybody that is considering our course as an option or is deciding on where to travel on Professional Work Experience to not hesitate to travel to Canada or anywhere abroad for this entire experience. We will likely never get the opportunity to experience this type of set up again and we have all agreed that most people will be around their current local area for long enough so why not just go?