Scoring sales instead of points

Traditionally there has been a lot of overlap between the worlds of football and farming. Mark O’Rourke of Univet looks to keep this alive as he balances his role as vice chairperson of Cavan County Board and technical sales manager of Univet, a Cootehill-based manufacturer and supplier of animal health and veterinary products. The range includes antibiotics, nutritional products like the Growvite range as well as anthelmintic (fluke and worm products) like Tramazole and Curafluke.

“I grew up on my uncle’s farm and always had an interest in it,” Mark says.

“I studied Agriculture in college. I never went back farming myself but have always had a close link to it. I got involved in the GAA instead, so it would be hard to maintain the two of them at once. I will be 25 years with Univet in November. I am involved in sales on the Irish market, advertising, marketing and providing advice for farmers.”

Export is a large part of the business and the market is constantly growing. Univet is a family-owned business with three generations working in the company, according to Mark.

“It was set up by George Crowe in the 1970s and three of his family - Siobhan, Conor and George - as well as his grandson Brian who currently work for the company. It’s a massive local employer in the Cootehill area with over 100 people employed,” revealed Mark.

He says his farming roots gave him a good grounding in the industry and it also overlaps a lot with his role in the GAA.

“Coming from a farming background, it helps me to understand farmers and the challenges they face at different times of the year. People in the GAA come from all walks of life, but I often meet people on the side of a pitch and they often ask about issues they might have on the farm.”

Due to the demanding nature of both modern football and farming, fewer people are able to balance both, especially at a high level according to Mark.

“In rural clubs, people still come from a farm but even that’s getting harder. But for intercounty players it’s almost impossible to balance full-time farming, especially dairy farming, with training as there could be training five or six nights a week.”

In his two and a half decades in Univet, Mark has seen a lot unfold in the company but says that global events have made the supply of products to the market difficult over the last few years.

“There was issues in supplying some of our products over the last while with Covid, Brexit, the war and price increases, and sourcing raw materials. It was definitely a lot more difficult over the last few years and trying to gauge how much stock to have. But we seem to be through the worst of it for now, things have settled somewhat, thankfully.”

One product that experienced supply issues was Sacrolyte, a calf scour treatment, which he says came at a bad time.

“Sacrolyte is an electrolyte for the treatment of scours in calves and we ran out of it in sachet form. We still had it in bucket form so we were focused on that for the interim. As electrolytes are a spring product, it wasn’t ideal to run out of it during this time because of the impact it could have on customers, as well the fact it could potentially allow us to lose out to competitors. But thankfully it didn’t last long and we were back to normal before long.”