Dairying can’t prosper in isolation from

THIS spring has focused attention on the growing dairy industry and the ability of a grass-based model to weather the storms — in some cases literally

The response of farming commentators has been predicable at best.

Those against the expansion in milk production jumped on the difficulties as proof positive that grassbased systems don’t work and are unsustainable.

The comments from those in favour of expanding milk production brought to mind the comment made by the Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.”

Like everything, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

We are located on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. We exist here because of the Gulf Stream ocean current, which ensures we enjoy a relatively benign climate despite our northerly latitude.

Sometimes the Gulf Stream is compliant and allows good growing conditions for 10 months, even 12 months of the year.

Sometime it doesn’t, and Ireland is then a wet, miserable place to be a farmer.

The last few years have lulled us into a sense of expectation about what we can achieve.

When the Gulf Stream plays ball, we can grow lots of grass, we can sow lots of grain, we can cut our costs, we can expand at will.

Then we get a year like this and our targets are decimated.

The end of EU milk quotas was accompanied by largely favourable weather conditions, so you could argue that the rapid expansion of the dairy herd happened under conditions unlikely to consistently prevail in the future.

What we have to do now is plan for the future.

A future where we could possibly have great growing seasons like 2015 and ’16. But also a future where we will also have the supposedly ‘freak’ weather that we suffered in ’08, ’09, ’10, ’12 and, so far, ’18.

The headlong rush into dairying, at the expense of other farming enterprises, cannot continue unabated.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to compare the current national dairy herd with the national herd of the ’70s or ’80s.

One thousand cows milking 400 gallons each on 100 farms spread evenly across a region is a completely different prospect to 1000 cows milking 1200 gallons each on three farms down the one lane.

It is also disingenuous to compare our national stocking rate with that in other countries.

Most of the livestock in this country are extensively stocked beef located generally in the west and midlands.

Dairy cows can’t be packed like sardines in Cork, Wexford and Tipperary just because suckler farmers in Leitrim work to their own limits.

For a start, water quality management issues don’t work to those parameters.