Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Beef Data and Genomics Programme: Discussion

2:00 pm

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the officials for attending. To say that was a quick tour of the genomics scheme would be an understatement. There is major concern about this. The first thing we must remember is there are 73,400 herd owners in the country and we must look at the profile of these people. The booklet associated with the scheme is enough to put off many people from joining it because they will say to themselves: "I will get clobbered in years five and six and the money I do not get, I do not miss, but the money I get that is clawed back I will miss when the claw-back happens." It is interesting that across the country there is a distinct impression that somebody has dreamt up this scheme in some laboratory of bureaucracy and science with no reference to the reality of the ordinary farmer and he or she is not willing even to listen to the concerns.

The first concern I have heard about relates to the claw-back and the penalty. The main concern about the penalty relates to not achieving the four star and five star status as required. I acknowledge the Minister's reassurances about force majeureand so on. Any confidence people would have had in the common sense of the Department and the European Union in respect of penalties went out the window with the LPIS review in 2013. There is a lack of confidence in the Department not to approach participants in five or six years' time under a different Minister and using different officials to say: "Sorry, these are the rules. Did you read your little booklet and in paragraph 52A(d) it says such and such? Sorry, a penalty will be imposed." That is what farmers are afraid of. The claw-back and penalty is a major issue.

I am not an expert in this but I welcome my colleague, Deputy Aylward, to the committee. He is an experienced farmer and he will be able to elaborate on a second issue that has been raised with me. I am told that in certain herds, the 60% requirement will mean one will run out of cattle to genotype unless one starts genotyping male cattle.

The third issue relates to the four- star and five-star status. Ideally, I would have liked representatives of the ICBF to have come before the committee to give members the A to Z of star ratings and to tell us exactly how they arrive at a star rating because I have heard more combinations and permutations about such ratings over the past three or four weeks to last me a lifetime. However, the pedigree breeders seem to have issues and Deputy Aylward will the deal with the technicalities such as lack of bulls and so on. There is a great worry when talking about maternal rates, lactation and milk production that what the Department will rate as a highly suitable animal will not suit hills and marginal land.

It would be like using a very productive lowland ewe and saying this produces a lot more lambs than any hill ewe and therefore we will put it up on the mountain. What will happen is that she will never come down again.

A fourth issue raised with me is one of these quirky little ones. Complying with this with regard to bulls out on islands becomes a particular challenge where they have their own ways of dealing with these issues. It is not that easy to bring bulls over and back to islands, and on islands, by definition, AI does not work. It is not a possibility because by the time the AI person is brought out, the cow would no longer be in heat. There is also the problem that a lot of farmers are part-time farmers and, again, AI is not how it is done.

I am very grateful to the Department for providing me with some figures. As I said, there are 73,640 herd owners in the country. The number of applications show, as one would expect, that the small herd owners have said, "Thanks, but no thanks; you can keep your scheme". Some 54% of the herd owners, which is more than half and is a majority in a referendum, have fewer than ten suckler cows. Only 22% of those have even sent in the form. I know they do not come to the Department and it does not affect the figures that much as to the number of animals in the scheme, but obviously the majority of herd owners are small herd owners and they have said, "Thanks, but no thanks." When we move to ten to 20 cows, 53% have applied and when we go to the higher deciles, the average is around 70%. To remember Pillar 2, the Minister said time and again that he would look after the marginal areas, the small farmers. Once again, the scheme is designed to be totally unattractive to the small operator.

This scheme needs to be radically reformed. I suggest that what we should do is see if the science really works in practice on the ground for six years. In an ideal world, what would make the scheme at least operable would be to reduce the genomic testing to 30% instead of 60%. The Department should say that genome information is provided to the farmer for the first six years but that it would be left to the farmer to decide how to use that information rather than the Department being prescriptive. As I said, there are serious reservations as to whether this will necessarily give them the one that suits the particular lands in question or the pedigrees and so on. If it is as profitable and produces much more profitable and greater calving numbers, the farmers will cotton on fairly fast and they will follow. However, it may not be as simple as the Department is making out - this is new science and it is very different from the dairy herd where one is talking about big herds, small numbers and professional farmers. If there are flaws in this, we will not have driven everybody into a very confined market where the price of certain type of cattle will be driven right through the ceiling. We will not have driven them into a crazy situation.

Finally, I have a question. A farmer rang me today and said that he had been in contact with the Department and it had informed him that if he did not withdraw from the scheme, as this farmer intended doing, before the ICBF pack issued if he then, having seen this information sheet, baulked at it at that stage because it was too bureaucratic and involved too much paperwork, too much risk or whatever he would be billed for the pack.

Is this correct? When will the packs issue to farmers? What is the cost of the pack as issued to farmers? To be quite honest, if that is true, the Department should write to all farmers within the week informing them that if they do not get out before the packs issue, they will end up paying money for having sent in a form to the Department for a scheme about which they have second thoughts. My belief is that a lot of farmers, big and small, have sent in the form hoping that the Minister would make radical changes to the scheme in view of the massive meetings that have been held in every corner of the country. It is my belief that as the Minister has made no change to the scheme and has not listened to anybody with regard to it, there will be a massive withdrawal from the scheme among all farmers but particularly among the farmers with fewer than ten suckler cows because, to put simple figures on it, when one takes out the direct cost of paying for the genotyping, a farmer with fewer than ten cattle, with six or seven cattle, will get only a few hundred euro for all his or her trouble. I think a lot of farmers will decide the risk is not worth the benefit because in five or six years' time, somebody can just ring up and say, "Sorry, we want the money back."

It is also written in this that when the inspector comes out to inspect for this scheme, part of the deal will be to do a whole farm inspection, but farmers are very reluctant these days for €300 or €400 to have any unnecessary whole farm inspections drawn on to them.

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