Dairy entrepreneur who became cream of the crop

Edmond Harty has helped Kerry-based Dairymaster to become a world leader in dairy equipment manufacture

Some farmers say picking a new milking parlour is a bigger decision than picking a wife. And it is only said half in jest. “After all, when you buy one of these milking parlours, you will have it for 20 years,” says Edmond Harty, technical director of dairy manufacturing group Dairymaster. Indeed, some marriages fizzle out long before the milking machine gives up.

Harty recalls how one Dutch customer emailed him to say he had just experienced two of the most significant events in his life. “He got married and he got his new milking parlour,” he says. “And he sent a picture of himself and his wife, in their wedding gear, down in the new milking parlour.”

The fact that the farmer wrote to Dairymaster to share this news speaks volumes about the type of relationship the north Kerry company has with its customers. Harty’s focus on customers was one of the factors highlighted when he was named the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year a fortnight ago. The judges also noted his company’s in-house research and development, advancements in engineering technology and innovative product range.

Winning the award was a major coup for the 36-year-old, who joined the family business 14 years ago. Dairymaster is now a leader in dairy equipment manufacturing and has operations in the UK and the United States, but it keeps its headquarters in Causeway, Co Kerry.

The company employs 280 people locally and another 25 in the US and Britain. Between 70 and 75 per cent of production is exported to more than 40 countries, including the US, Japan and Siberia. Dairymaster entered the German market 10 years ago “and we have nearly 25 per cent of the market in milking equipment”, he says.

As well as the milking parlours, the group manufactures automated feeding systems, automatic manure scrapers, milk cooling equipment and cow fertility monitors.

It’s all a far cry from the days when Harty’s father Ned started the company in 1968. He was the second son, so his older brother inherited the farm and he had to find something else to do.

He noticed that milking machines were beginning to take off but that farmers had to wait about six months to get one installed. So he began importing and installing them.

“He sold 19 in the first year, which was an awful lot at the time,” Harty recalls. Then he began manufacturing milking machines.

Young Edmond spent a lot of his free time at the business, skipping homework whenever he could. As an eight or nine-year-old, he was obsessed with technology and would take a bus to the shops in Tralee on Saturday mornings to look at the fancy new Commodore 64 computers.

He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Limerick and went on to complete a PhD on milking performance in University College Dublin. His research focused on what was going on between the milking machine and the cow.

Competition

“It’s like the performance of a car engine. You can measure fuel consumption and find out how quickly the car can go from zero to 100km. But there was no research like that for milking.”

The benefits of his research are still being felt today. Dairymaster milking parlours typically milk a cow one minute faster than the competition and deliver 5 per cent higher milk yields in scientific trials.

The quicker milking time saves the typical Irish dairy farmer between 12 and 20 minutes each day. “When that’s added up over a year, it’s a lot of time saved,” he says.

Doing the PhD also brought him into contact with scientific bodies and his research was used in developing international standards for milking equipment.

Dairymaster’s biggest rotary milking parlour can produce enough milk to feed half a million people a day. “That would be thousands of cows, producing 180,000 to 200,000 litres of milk a day. We sell them typically in places like Texas.”

But for all the focus on milking machines, it was the automatic scrapers that helped Dairymaster break into the export market. The company got its first export order for the manure scrapers from Britain in 1990.

Harty is adding to the product range all the time. The Moo Monitor device worn around the cow’s neck tells a farmer when the cow is in heat, and ready for insemination. It gives detailed information about the cow’s cycle and highlights animals that are not coming into heat. The information is fed into the computer and can also be accessed with a smartphone app.

Dairymaster is unusual in that it does all its manufacturing in Kerry.

“An awful lot of people would take the view, ‘Oh, sub-contract this out to Asia’, but we’ve taken the opposite view,” he says. “Okay, you’ll have a higher labour cost associated with it but you have a certain amount of control and a certain amount of speed when it comes to doing new stuff.”

Running an international business from north Kerry has its ups and downs. “There are no traffic delays getting in and out of work,” he says. The majority of people working in Dairymaster live within an hour of the facility.

The downside of working in a rural area is that he finds it hard to get staff with skills in areas such as electronics and software.

“That is limiting our growth, no doubt about it. There’s stuff that we’d love to get at, but we can’t because we haven’t got the people.”

He believes the Entrepreneur of the Year award will change that. “Maybe people didn’t know we are here. Now an awful lot more people know about us.”

Dairymaster is currently looking for staff in areas such as software and electronics, technical communications and marketing.

Winning the award has also generated a positive buzz in the company and in Co Kerry. “If you are recognised as being one of the leading companies in Ireland, it gives you additional credibility when you go into new markets where you are not known.”

And the company will get a second boost when he represents Ireland in the World Entrepreneur of the Year awards in Monte Carlo next June. He says this will be good for Ireland, as well as Dairymaster.

“A lot of other countries will see that agriculture and food is important for Ireland. I think there’s a big opportunity to fly that flag.”

He believes the agri-food sector presents “huge opportunities” for Ireland but says it won’t happen without serious effort. We like to think the whole world knows about Ireland and its green image, but he recalls meeting a Japanese farmer who had no idea where Ireland was. The farmer asked what the leading Irish food brands were but he had never heard of any of them.

“He had heard about U2 and Enya,” he says, “and Baileys and Guinness. That was it. If we could be known across the world for good food, I think it would rise a lot of boats. It should be our aim to be known in Ireland for the best food in the world.”

Obstacles

He believes we don’t highlight the excellence of our food traceability system enough and says we should be able to set up a system which would allow a customer to pick up a piece of Irish beef in the shop and scan it with a mobile phone. This would tell where the meat came from, give details about the farm and provide tourist information about the area.

Asked if a recovery is in sight yet for the Irish economy, he says it all hinges on increasing exports. And he believes the focus should always be on removing obstacles to this trade.

“I think we should ask ourselves, in every process that affects Irish business, is it necessary to do this?”

Government, State agencies and regulatory authorities should be looking at all their policies and regulations and asking themselves if these measures are hindering or growing exports. “And if they are hindering exports, we have to ask why and can we get rid of them?”

These are exciting times for anyone involved in the dairy industry, as farmers look forward to the abolition of the EU milk quota system in 2015. He says there are huge challenges ahead with much volatility in milk prices expected.

“But there’s no doubt, there are huge opportunities there as well.”

His father Ned is now 69, still involved in the business and looking forward to all those opportunities. “He’ll always be involved,” his son says. “That’s what he gets his buzz from.”

CV Edmond Harty

Name: Edmond Harty

Job: Technical director of Dairymaster

Age: 36

Family: Married to Síle. They have two children, Eamonn (5) and Niamh (2)

Lives: Ballyheigue, Co Kerry

Hobbies: Work and family take up most of his time but he occasionally swims.

In the news because: He has been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year

Most likely to say: We want to make dairy farming more profitable, enjoyable and sustainable for our customers

Least likely to say: I really hate all this techie stuff