Meeting ‘Zooms’ in on calf birth

But 23-year-old Aghalee farmer and lecturer Ryan Lavery didn’t flinch when he realised that one of his cattle was close to giving birth just as he was connected with around 10 other Council members last Wednesday night. He simply headed across the fields, phone in hand, to help finish off the job at hand, all the while streaming it so his rather surprised counterparts could get a full view of the action.

“Most of my weekly work meetings have also been taking place over Zoom - though none of them have been as interesting as this,” he laughed.

Ryan, who teaches degree level students at CAFRE Greenmount, farms along with his grandfather, with around 40 Dexters under their care.

On the evening in question, he had previously checked the expectant cow at around 6pm.

Just over an hour later, he decided to take a walk down the fields, taking his phone with him so he could maintain his presence in the meeting.

“The others were starting to inquire where I was heading,” he smiles.

“I said, ‘I’ve just got a cow calving here, I’ll just be two seconds.’

“They laughed - they couldn’t believe it.

“Luckily I wasn’t actually speaking at that point. I was trying not to disrupt the meeting as much as possible.

“By the time I arrived, the cow pretty much had the majority of the work done.

“So I turned the phone around so they could all see what was happening.

“Then I just walked back to the house and carried on with the meeting!”

For Ryan, it was all, he said, “just part and parcel” of being a cattle farmer.

“I suppose I didn’t really think anything of it at the time,” he says.

“All that was in my mind was - I have a meeting on and a cow calving!

“Then last night I sent the rest of the members a wee update to say that everything was grand with the calf.

“Thankfully there were no complications. Dexters are normally quite easily calved, but you can still get the odd issue as you would with any birth.”

The former Queen’s University Belfast student says he didn’t really feel under any pressure to, quite literally, deliver, under the watchful and amazed eyes of his colleagues, simply because the birth was well advanced, and all he needed to do was step in to give that helping hand at the end.

“I just gave it a quick pull, and got back to the meeting,” he added