The government has been urged to introduce measures to deal with "wildly erratic and unpredictable" farm incomes.

Speaking to Tánaiste and Minister for Finance, Simon Harris, and Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) said the nature of farm incomes is "causing a looming succession crisis".

With just weeks to go before Budget 2027, ICMSA president Denis Drennan said in a meeting this week, that meaningful measures are needed "to ensure some degree of predictability and capacity for planning".

He warned that the alternative will be that the next generation of potential farmers would "vote with their feet and pursue careers other than farming where they were so desperately required".

Drennan said that ICMSA had been pointing out for a decade that it was "eminently possible" to introduce measures that would allow farmers to put funds aside in Revenue-supervised accounts.

This could help "smooth out" income streams in a way that would "allow them to avoid the worst destruction inflicted by the kinds of boom to bust cycles we have seen in recent years".

According to Drennan, the ability to draw down on these deposit accounts during the worst of years and circumstances, may be the only measure that can be taken to ensure that basic household expenses and necessities are covered.

New entrants

The ICMSA president maintained that income averaging "simply didn’t work - and specifically didn’t work for new entrants".

"ICMSA’s own surveys showed that young farmers repeatedly cited the wildly erratic and unpredictable nature of farm incomes as the biggest obstacle to their going back and taking over their family farms," Drennan said.

“We know that the sons and daughters of farm families are just not willing to maybe uproot their families and leave paid employment ... to go back to take over the family farm.

"[They] could then see after a whole year’s work that they’ve actually made less than the minimum wage or even lost money - as our dairy farmer members have in the year from September 2025 to now." 

He explained that some degree of predictability has to be introduced to farm incomes through a farm deposit scheme.

"We have put forward several versions of such a scheme trying to show the departments concerned that this is both feasible and necessary."

Drennan noted that several countries had already brought forward the implementation of schemes of this nature to deal with this challenge.

The ICMSA president said it was explained to ministers at this week's meeting "that it’s possible to address these problems with a bit of imagination and energy".  

"Unless we move positively to solve this problem then we won’t have that next generation of farmers, and the family farm model that was the basis of rural Ireland will stop," Drennan added.