‘Serious beef farmers are hurting badly’

Suckler farmers’ confidence is at an all-time low even though our beef producing heritage should be the envy of Europe, writes

IN the next couple of years, we are going to have to make a serious decision about whether we continue suckling. I have never felt as disillusioned about it as I do now.

This year has been the perfect storm.

First thing was the weather. We started off with a late spring, so the remains of the winter feed had to be stretched out to the very last and the stock missed a month’s grazing.

After an excellent few weeks growth, drought kicked in.

We ended up taking lighter than anticipated cuts of firstcut silage, got no second-cut at all and only a small third-cut.

The only thing we hope will get us through this winter is that we kept extra straw and barley, from our tillage enterprise.

However, we are not certain that we have enough feed, which is a stressful situation.

Then there’s the price. Irish beef prices usually track the British trade but they have recently diverged. The weekly kill is not running much ahead of last year. It appears that there is excess profit-taking by the market; they will deny it and we can’t prove it.

If prices had stayed parallel, beef animals would be making €100 more per head at the moment, give or take a few quid.

But the really big thing this year, that has put the tin hat on everything, is the way the suckler cow is being talked down, that she somehow is in the way.

The tide started to turn when milk quotas ended. I don’t want to pit one farmer against another but, when quotas went, official Ireland took the attitude that everybody should go milking cows

I don’t begrudge the dairy farmers one penny they make, they work bloody hard for it. But basically the message seems to be that suckler cows should go to make way for the expansion of the dairy herd, in terms of carbon footprint.

I wonder if someone somewhere has set a figure of 500,000, the number of suckler cows referenced in the budget, that official Ireland would be happy to let them fall to?

The genomics scheme and the BEEP are all fine and dandy but the suckler farmer and the suckler cow need a lift in the here and now.

If there was a will in the Government, the suckler way of farming is tailor-made for some sort of an environmental scheme that could be the envy of other beef producing countries.

What really gets me are the various underlying contradictions in what is happening.

Carbon footprint

Everybody knows that dairying is more profitable than beef and it is constantly trumpeted that Ireland is one of the most sustainable producers of milk.

But Ireland is also a very sustainable producer of beef. The carbon footprint of Irish beef, 19kg CO2-eq, is far lower than, say, Brazilian beef, at 80 kg when land use change is included or 48kg when land use change is not.

I find it hard to see how an