The president of the Agricultural Consultants’ Association (ACA) has said that farmers should be mindful of the fact that farm advisors do not receive texts from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) on slurry movements.
Noel Feeney was speaking on Agriland’s AgriFocus podcast this week when he was asked why some slurry exports go unverified.
Feeney said that some farmers, when they receive a text saying there is a record of slurry movement to their farm awaiting verification through the Agfood system, may assume that their advisor received the text as well.
However, this is not the case.
As recently reported by Agriland, almost 4,000 movements of slurry in 2023 were not verified by the importing farmer by the closing date of December 31.
According to the department, these movements are deemed to have not taken place.
In other words, these volumes of slurry are considered to have remained on the farm of origin.
December 31, 2023 was the deadline for the notification and verification of livestock manure movements that took place in 2023.
Noel Feeney said: “We’ve moved away in the last year-and-a-half to two years from a paper exercise of recording slurry movements to an online system on the nitrogen and phosphorous system on Agfood.
“Say for example you’re exporting slurry to me, say you’re exporting 200m3 to my farm. You or your advisor will input that into the system. The department will then send a message to my phone to say there is an unverified slurry movement,” he added.
“So I as a farmer must go into Agfood and download it, and verify it, or I contact my advisor to go into the system and download it and verify it,” the ACA president said.
“Now one of the problems I think that’s happening here is that the farmer is receiving those text messages, but also believes that his or her advisor is receiving those text messages as well, and they’re not double checking.
“If you’re getting those text messages, you need to contact your advisor, because the advisor does not receive that text message from the Department of Agriculture,” Feeney said.
He suggested that more should be done to inform farmers of what they need to do when they receive a text from the department.
“I think a lot of this is education. I think a lot of this is falling down between the two stools…that I’ve got a text as a farmer, surely my advisor is getting the text message, but that its not the case and won’t be the case,” he said.
“I think its important that everyone is alert to the fact that there is going to be verification of slurry required at such and such a date.”
This misunderstanding by some farmers over what they have to do in this case may be exacerbated in the future, Feeney suggested, if the requirement to record and verify slurry movements was to become more regular and frequent.
“At the moment that is not done on a real-time basis, but who’s to say down the road that mightn’t be done maybe at seven days notification. We don’t know,” he said.