Professor Gerry Boyle:

The Deputy is absolutely right. Without the basic payment scheme, farmers could not survive on the income levels from suckler farming. According to the Teagasc national farm survey, the typical family income from a suckler farm is about €10,000. That mainly involves the basic payment to the farmer. Clearly there is a viability issue. When one analyses the problem it is not difficult to explain why it is at that level. There is quite a spread of people engaged in suckler farming. Very few of them would be full-time, commercial type farmers. Many of these farmers are older people who perhaps are stepping down from a career in dairy farming or the fattening of animals and they like to be involved in farming. A lot of them are part-time farmers whose livelihood is not dependent on the income from their suckler enterprise. It is, therefore, a very challenging area. There is no escaping the fact that this has not happened today or yesterday. I am in this business a fair long time now at this stage, and we have always had this problem within the suckler industry. The fattening sector is a little better but it is highly variable. The suckler industry, however, has a huge difficulty.

Teagasc tries to emphasise that we can have a win-win pathway for dry stock farmers from dairy, but it will take a while for a mindset change. There are huge opportunities, for example, for dry stock farmers who are expert at managing cattle and herding to rear young animals. There is already a small number of farmers engaging in that and they are doing very well. We also believe there are opportunities for farmers to fatten animals coming off the dairy herd, which was much more common prior to the dairy quota. There are far fewer animals coming off the dairy herd, for example, beef animals, than we had before the dairy quota. There are opportunities there and rather than this false antagonism between dairy and the rest, we should be trying to see how income earning opportunities can be complemented as dairying is moving forward.