Our Journey so far

In September 2025 we heard about this competition in school, and we were very interested in it. We had previously heard about this competition when our school had a group that got to the final of this competition a few years ago. In September and October, we put our thinking caps on got to work trying to come up with an idea for this competition.  

After many failed ideas we all came to agree on this idea “looking at ways to lower the slaughter age of cattle to improve environmental sustainability”.   We thought that this was a very good idea as we do need to reduce the age of slaughter for our climate 2030 targets. We thought that it would be very useful to create awareness about this. 

So, in October we got to work on creating our 3-minute video where we talked about our project idea and why we would like to do this competition. 

Luckily on the 3rd of December 2025 we found out that we were on of the many groups picked to advance to the interview stage of this competition. We were very happy and were looking forward to this chance to have an interview with representatives from Kepak, ABP and Certified Irish Angus. The date for our interview was the 13th of January in Moorepark in Fermoy. We continued to work on our project in the weeks leading up to the interview.  

We thought that we did good in our interview, but we weren't sure was it enough to get us through to Croke park. It was a nervous wait until the day we got to find out whether we got to go to Croke park or not. 

As part of promoting and creating awareness for our idea, we set of to our local mart where we talked to different farmers speaking about our hopes and ideas for the competition and spoke a bit about the Certified Irish Angus producer group.  

 On the 27th of January we were delighted when we found out we were going to Croke park. We also attended a post interview webinar which was very interesting. We have been looking forward to this brilliant opportunity