THERE WAS an air of optimism at the Teagasc National Beef Conference in Kilkenny yesterday, where farmers were told that with world food demand growing, they could achieve the 20 per cent rise in exports laid out in the Government’s 2020 Harvest Report.
They heard they could almost double the profit they make from their beef herds if they followed the advice of Teagasc experts who have achieved this on study farms in the State.
The hundreds of farmers who attended the event in the Cillin Hill centre heard from the director of the agriculture and food development authority, Prof Gerry Boyle, that they had a real future.
He said Teagasc’s main problem would be to get the information on systems across to beef farmers and he said it would do all it could with limited resources to get the positive message that there was a future in beef production and how to achieve it.
“We have lost 150 advisers since 2008, but we have 44 full-time advisers working on the beef side and we are fully committed to it,” he said.
Prof Boyle said the beef industry was also working with Teagasc on a number of projects and had funded research in a number of areas including the production of bull beef.
He hoped that the industry might help Teagasc set up a beef demonstration farm in the west, where many of the 100,000 beef farmers were located.
Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney was scheduled to open the event but could not make it. Minister for State for Food Shane McEntee, deputising for him, said that while there were challenges, the targets would be met.
However, he warned that the development and expansion of the beef sector would only take place if it was profitable for individual farmers and this meant improving the technology take-up at farm level, breeding the right animals and managing grassland efficiently.
Cormac Healy of Meat Industry Ireland, representing the processing plants, said he too believed the targets set in the 2020 report could be achieved and the reputation of the Irish beef industry globally was unrivalled.
Irish beef, he said, was listed in more retail stores than beef from any other country in the world. World demand for food was growing and the competitive advantage farmers had here with a grass-based system was a major one.
He said the industry was also moving to supply the demands of the market as was clearly seen by the shift in Ireland to the production of bull beef from steer (castrated male) beef.
He said bull beef production here stood at close to 30 per cent, whereas it was down at 16 per cent two years ago.
The difficulties facing the sector were not neglected at the conference, especially the need for continuing direct support payments from Brussels, which has been keeping many of the less productive beef farmers afloat.
John Bryan, the Irish Farmers’ Association president, said it was unreasonable and a non-runner to expect any farmer, who has invested heavily in their business, to take a cut in their direct payments as a result of Common Agricultural Policy 2013.
The conference also heard there was likely to be a small reduction of about 10 per cent from the 100,000 farms involved in beef production.
Figures would also suggest the number of beef-producing suckler cows looked set to fall annually by 14,000 head per year.
However, this would be offset by beef and veal production from an expanding dairy herd, which would be increasing in size as dairy farmers planned for the end of the milk quota system, which limits their output.ilk quota system.