Why are our beef prices caught in a time-warp?
WITH CHRISTMAS and the New Year receding from our minds, it’s a good time to have a look at what 2017 may have in store for our farms and for Irish cattle farming in general.
My own cattle are looking very well and while the good weather this back-end may account for this, it could also be down to the fact that I appear to have bought a better type store animal this year.
However, I can remember thinking the same about my store cattle a few years ago when it made very little difference to their eventual factory grades.
If there’s one thing which really annoys beef farmers, it’s the total unpredictability of the beef grading system.
As I mentioned last month, Australians felt the same and have now changed over to an x-ray type grading system which makes a lot more sense than just using surface pictures.
It would be nice to hear what our own Department thinks, or are they at all interested in remedying the current grading malaise?
Being able to delay housing because of the good weather was a great bonus. Hopefully it won’t delay spring growth too much; it has certainly helped my supply of silage.
The group of seven plain cattle that I bought last October have also done well, but they are still way behind the rest of the stock.
Only time will tell if the €150 per head spared on their purchase price proves to have been a false economy or not.
Of course the top of my own wish list for 2017 would be to get a good growing season and repeat the weight gain achieved in 2016. Good grass management is obviously critically important, but I’m afraid that unless nature provides us with the correct conditions for growing grass, a repeat of the 2016 record weight gains will be very difficult to achieve.
Even though we are poles apart on the use of GM technology in food production, I must congratulate my fellow Farming Independent columnist PJ Phelan for highlighting the hypocrisy surrounding the GM issue in Ireland.
While we congratulate ourselves for our green production systems, PJ quite correctly points out that: “They (the consumers) need to be aware that most (Irish) meat is produced from animals that have consumed GM feedstuffs”.
This highlights for me one of the greatest scandals in modern Irish farming; farmers were neither consulted or indeed informed that GM ingredients were being included in the feedstuffs we were purchasing for our stock.
Our farming organisations
THE AVERAGE PRICE I GOT FOR MY CATTLE IN 2016 WAS JUST 12C/KG MORE THAN THE PRICE I GOT OVER 27 YEARS AGO