Mr. Michael Crosse:

With sheep, you have to start early in the season. The milking season starts in January or February. No matter whether you started lambing in February or May, when the days start to shorten at the end of September, the milk yield will start to reduce regardless of when the sheep lambed in the summer. The milking season is approximately six or seven months. The length of lactation dictates milk yield and profitability with sheep, just as with cows. The key thing in Ireland as opposed to some of the other major producers is that, when you are milking sheep in Ireland, even though a sheep might only produce 1 l or 0.75 l a day in autumn, the solids are high and the costs of production are really low. They are getting all of that from grass whereas, in an intensive system such as those in Italy or Spain where sheep are indoors all of the time, the animals are always kept on a high-energy diet of feed that has to be bought in and the lower yield makes that unprofitable very quickly. In Ireland, the costs are carried early in the season through high production, high yields and lamb sales and then, in the second half of the season, the sheep are very easy to manage and you can extract a monthly income at a very low cost. That is a key part of the resilience of sheep.