Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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514. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the strength of the national beef herd, the dairy herd, the pig herd and the sheep flock; the extent to which numbers have fluctuated over the past ten years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [7462/18]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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The national beef, dairy, pig herds, and sheep flocks make an enormous contribution to Ireland’s agri-food industry which in 2017 grew to a total of €13.5 billion.

One of the key indicators of the strength of the different sectors in Irish agriculture is the growth in exports over the years.

Since 2010, the value of Irish beef exports has increased from €1.57 billion to €2.5 billion, the value of dairy exports has increased from €2.27 billion to €4.02 billion, the value of pig meat exports has increased from €336 million to €712 million and the value of sheep meat exports has increased from €163 million to €275 million. This increase in the value of exports has been realised notwithstanding the challenges the different sectors have encountered in recent years, the most recent of which is of course Brexit.

The numbers of livestock in the different sectors over the last ten years have fluctuated from enterprise to enterprise. Within the last ten years dairy cow numbers based on the CSO June livestock surveys increased from a total of 1,087,000 in the June 2007 survey to 1,432,700 in the June 2017 livestock survey, which itself was an increase of 2.5% from June 2016. This increase has been driven to a large extent by the abolition of milk quotas in 2015.

In relation to the size of the national beef herd, the number of non-dairy cows recorded by the CSO June livestock survey shows a decrease of 2.1% from 1,103,700 in June 2016 to 1,081, 000 in June 2017. The CSO Livestock survey for June 2007 showed the number of non-dairy cows as 1,180,000 head. The total size of the national beef herd will of course comprise both the progeny of the national suckler herd as well as non-replacement stock from the dairy herd.

The size of the national sheep flock based on census returns over the last ten years has risen from a low of 3.07 million sheep in 2009 to a high of 3.91 million recorded in the 2016 census.

With regards to the size of the national pig herd, the method of data collected was changed in 2011 and since then numbers according to the pig census have risen from a low of approximately 1.35 million pigs in 2012 to a high of approximately 1.6 million pigs in 2016.