What we look for
- Milking twice a day to a consistent, hygienic routine — teat prep, cluster attachment and removal, post-milking disinfection, plant washing and milk cooling.
- Spotting trouble early: mastitis, lameness, milk fever, a cow off feed. Administering medicines and vaccines under direction and recording them, including milk withdrawal periods.
- Calving — knowing when to assist and when to call the vet, getting colostrum into the calf quickly, and rearing calves through to weaning.
- The rest of the day: paddock rotation and strip wires, fencing, feeding, silage and yard work, slurry and scraping.
- Operating a tractor, loader, diet feeder or quad where the farm needs it.
Questions you'll be asked
These are the questions the application form asks. You do not need to answer yes to every one — they tell us where your experience actually sits.
- How many years you have worked with dairy cows on a commercial farm
- The largest herd you have milked
- The parlour types you have worked in — herringbone, swing-over, rotary, abreast, tie-stall or robotic
- Whether you have run the full milking routine unsupervised, day in day out
- Whether you have supervised calvings and assisted a difficult birth
- Whether you have reared calves from birth to weaning
- Whether you can carry out heat detection and artificial insemination
- Which machinery you can operate
Qualifications that help
None of these is essential, and a qualification from any country counts.
- An agricultural or animal husbandry qualification from any country — QQI Level 5/6, SENAR, ITI, TESDA NC II Animal Production, a state dairy diploma or a national equivalent
- An artificial insemination (AI) certificate
- Milking machine, milk quality or hygiene training
- Hoof care or hoof trimming training
- A tractor or telehandler licence
- An animal welfare or animal transport certificate
- Safe Pass or equivalent farm safety training
We assess English at around CEFR A2 for this role — enough to follow instructions and raise a problem with the person you work for. That is our own standard, not an Irish legal requirement; there is no English test in the permit rules for this job.
Pay and the work permit
Dairy farm assistant roles sit on the standard General Employment Permit band — €36,605 a year, based on a 39-hour week at €18.05 an hour. The hourly rate is what DETE checks, so a 40-hour contract needs €37,544 rather than €36,605. The National Minimum Wage of €14.15 an hour applies to all hours worked.
This role is eligible for a General Employment Permit: it is carved out of DETE's ineligible occupations list by name. The job normally has to pass a 28-day Labour Market Needs Test — the employer runs that, advertising the role with JobsIreland/EURES and on a second jobs platform for 28 unbroken days. Either you or the employer can be named as the applicant on the permit itself; on our placements it is the employer. Either way the cost is not yours to carry: under section 55 of the Employment Permits Act 2024 an employer cannot take the permit fee, recruitment costs, or travel money they have already paid you out of your wages, or ask you to pay any of it back. Doing that is a criminal offence.
S.I. 643/2025 set a figure of 850 permits for dairy farm assistant from 17 December 2025. That figure sat in Schedule 5 of the Regulations, and S.I. 213/2026 replaced Schedule 5 on 13 May 2026 without a dairy row, so no statutory cap applies to the role today. DETE has published no notice closing dairy applications, and the dairy notice still on its site closed the earlier 406-permit pot, as at 23 September 2026. We cannot see from outside how DETE is administering dairy applications, so we confirm the current position with DETE before an employer advertises.
How long it takes
From an employer offering the job to you starting work, in our experience the realistic timeline is 6 to 8 months if you need an entry visa — the Philippines, for example. From a country that does not need an entry visa, such as Brazil, allow about 4 to 5 months. That covers the 28-day Labour Market Needs Test, DETE permit processing, the visa and travel. DETE processes applications in date order and publishes its current dates; we do not quote a figure that could be out of date by the time you read it.
If you are already living in Ireland on a permit, the position is different — tell us on the form and we will explain where you stand.
Apply
The application takes about ten minutes. You will be asked about your experience, and you can upload a CV and record a short voice clip so we can put you forward properly.