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Viability of small dairy farm
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At 450 points consider woodwork or metalwork teaching in UL. Hours to suit dairy or beef and reasonably well paid. Nice subjects too as youngsters like them so no trouble.
450 points would be a proper stretch, wouldnt be a bad job by any means once the children would listen, i would hate to be teaching our current class for woodwork and i'd hate to be known as the useless bastard in it for the pension as thats exactly what my woodwork teacher is
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TheBoyConor wrote: »OP, I have made my view on the mechanicing "career" known, so I will say no more about that. However, I still think diving into the dairy business at your first start at life is really cutting yourself short. You are only 17. From the way you talk here, you do seem driven and smart. I think you have much more potential than to be messing around with machinery or just spend your life dairy farming. Not that there is anything wrong with farming per se, but to just go straight into it without exploring more worthwhile and stable careers, you would be really hamstringing yourself. Get a proper qualification in some professional field related to agriculture or engineering if they are the fields that interest you.
If you want a more realistic window into the future, I'd recommend watching the film Pilgrim Hill. It depicts a what can be a rather grim and isolating reality it can be for someone like the character joe to reach middle early age having never broadened their horizons at the outset, and spend their life thus far in the thrall of the land and cows, haunted by the crushing regret at how things could have been different if life had taken a different path.
I think this line from the film about sums it up.....
........."if I were to die and meet the person i could have been, instead of the person I am now."....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkA3_yO1kJ4
Do you have the link for to watch the full movie?
Caught between a rock and a hard place with the dairying, to be able to get into it late 20s would be the latest age to get into it anything later than that and youll spend your entire farming life paying back the bank, plus with the possibilty of children youd want to be well set up and have a stable income from it.
That quote from Pilgrim Hill made me think of a few farmers around me tbh tis a powerful quote
Will look into an ag science or electrical degree if i could get the points for it instead of the engineering, i may be stubborn but im not entirely thick
30+years of milking cows would be a fair bit considering its twice a day nearly 300 days a year, but it is definitely what i would like to do eventually as my love really is for farming0 -
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Do you have the link for to watch the full movie?
Caught between a rock and a hard place with the dairying, to be able to get into it late 20s would be the latest age to get into it anything later than that and youll spend your entire farming life paying back the bank, plus with the possibilty of children youd want to be well set up and have a stable income from it.
That quote from Pilgrim Hill made me think of a few farmers around me tbh tis a powerful quote
Will look into an ag science or electrical degree if i could get the points for it instead of the engineering, i may be stubborn but im not entirely thick
30+years of milking cows would be a fair bit considering its twice a day nearly 300 days a year, but it is definitely what i would like to do eventually as my love really is for farming
Makes no difference. You will spend your life paying it back anyway, even IF, IF, you have kids. Kids are extraordinarily expensive to raise.
Indeed it is. That film Pilgrim Hill needs to be shown to people in school because it is literally the story of a massive swath of rural Ireland, much of which in the isolated parts is racked with isolation, depression, suicides. You know these fellas yourself sure. I have had to cut 2 people down in my locality. One a friend, who luckily survived and is doing OK.When i said 450 points would be a stretch i mean its a really long stretch, i dont have the memory capacity for writing down 6 years worth of stuff in 3 hours, im good at remembering useless ****e but not stuff i actually want to remember, I wouldn't be going into dairy straight away, my original plan was ag engineering course in pallaskenry but now im not so sure about it as Conor has pointed out its a fairly **** job for minimal pay and just pure abuse, and then around age 25 maybe head home and start plans to convert to dairy then
The Pallaskenry Level 6 & 7 courses aren't really worth much in themselves to be honest. You won't have much prospects to be hired on the back of either of them. The website alludes to this as it suggests progression onto traditional engineering degree. So they are a useful back door if you don't qualify for CAO entry. And you will probably be well ahead then as you'll have the experience and basics covered already.
Most universities do a common entry 1st year engineering. It gives a flavour of many disciplines of engineering and you then speciallise in the 2nd year onwards.0 -
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TheBoyConor wrote: »Well it depends. You can work in a number of difference types of places as a civil engineer. Since it is such a broad field, you could be doing a multitide of things.
1. Consultant engineers. You'd be mostly working on things like design of schemes of work, analysing problems and coming up with solutions anything from small things you could hold in your hand like designing a particular steel or concrete component part, or bigger sizing the types of beam to go into a building's floor or roof, to even bigger things like modelling how a whole building reacts to wind loads, to much bigger scale stuff like analysing and modelling the rainfall and flow of water in the whole river Shannon basin, to looking at the numbers of bikes, pedestrians and vehicles moving through a whole city road network in order to optimise it. A lot of desk work and report writing sometimes.
You could also be assigned to supervise work being carried out by a contractor on a construction site. That is a resident engineer job, and can be highly paid.
There are literally hundreds of companies but the big names in the field would be the likes of Arup, Jacobs, RPS, Atkins, Mott McDonald,
2. Contractor. The action end of it. Machinery, muck shifting, digging, big concrete pours, laying pipelines, building buildings, etc etc. You could be setting out work, organising work crews and machinery, looking after health and safety would be a big enough part of an engineers job. Depending on your position, you could be paid say 30k as a site engineer to perhaps 100-120k as a contract manager in charge of the whole job or several jobs.
Companys like Sisk, BAM, Hegarty, Roadbridge would be the big name companies in this side.
3. Utilities and public authorities. Public or private organisations like Councils, Irish Water, ESB, Bord Gais, broadband and telecoms companies, the Office of Public Works, some Government Departments. Managing day to day engineering operations of the businesses they run, and managing consultants and contractors who are brought in to do non-routine work or build new infrastructure for them.
4. Other companies like property developers, or big multinationals with factories would often hire civil engineers to look after and manage building maintenance and any changes or new build stuff. Even the HSE would employ a certain number of civil engineers to manage their maintenance and new build jobs.
As an electrical engineer, you could easily end up working for any of the above also, certainly in the bigger employers.
I think the resident engineer type job would suit you maybe. Or working site based with a contractor.
Another type of job in civil engineering would be to become an engineering technician. It is more hands on stuff, perhaps doing different types of surveys in the field, working with different types of technical equipment, perhaps lab work testing materials and components, doing engineering drawings on a computer and so on. It used to be a level 7 degree for this but it is moving more towards a level 8 degree for to work as a technician nowadays.
Possibly. But the thing is, in 15 or 20 years time, you would still be earning the same wage. 15-20 years after graduating from 4/5 years in a good engineering school doing a civil generalist and you would be looking at a good 80k per year if you were good and progressed.
But remember, doing a qualification is not the same as being an engineer. You do an accredited qualification, typically to level 9 nowadays, then you work and gain experience and train on-the-job for 4-5 years, then you become professionally qualified as an chartered engineer. This is an subtle but important point. There are any number of people floating around being loosely called engineers because they studied engineering at some level at some time, but they aren't professionally qualified as such.
4 years of college though then 2 or 3 years experience before you go out on your own
be 30 years old before you start getting anywhere at all plus there isn't 100% security in that, what if there was another crash in the building sector 7 or 8 years of recovery is a long time to be without a job, and I'd be hoping to be heading home to the farm then anyway, making millions isn't my concern, having a job to fall back on if things went to **** in dairy and make a handy living is
Civil engineering would be a good job, but it just wouldn't suit me trying to get into dairy before 300
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