The chief executive of the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) Sean Coughlan has admitted that communication with farmers around changes to the beef breeding index has been “sub-optimal”.
He made the comments before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine today (Wednesday, December 13) where ICBF representatives discussed the recent re-classification of the indices.
Members of the committee spoke of the mental and financial stress the changes have caused to beef farmers, with many stating that the ICBF has “lost the dressing room”.
TDs and senators said they had been inundated with calls from farmers and breed societies who have huge concerns about the impact of the changes.
“Our communication of these changes needs to be reviewed to better manage the anxiety that farmers and herd owners feel when these indicators change,” Sean Coughlan said.
ICBF has written to all Suckler Carbon Efficiency Programme (SCEP) participants this week and is planning “further direct communication to allay fears and to ensure farmers have a full understanding of what the changes are”.
ICBF will establish an industry stakeholder forum early in 2024 “to engage with all stakeholders on the suckler beef indexes”.
ICBF
TDs and senators on the committee called on ICBF to pause the implementation of the changes to the indices, pending the outcome of an independent review and further consultation with farmers and breed societies.
However, the ICBF chief executive ruled out this out stating that “the reality is that either the indexes are published, or they’re not published” and people want to know how the changes will impact them.
Coughlan said that breeding cattle is “a long-term business” and it would take six or seven years before the full impact of the changes would be seen.
He said that if ICBF did not implement the changes now it would be accused of having “sleepwalked” the suckler industry into breeding a cow that was not fit for purpose in the coming years.
SCEP
ICBF is currently engaged with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) in relation to the farmers in SCEP who will be most impacted by the index changes.
Coughlan said that he did not want to see any farmer who has “acted in good faith” penalised, but added that the terms and conditions of the scheme are a matter for the department.
The committee heard that some members of the ICBF board had expressed concerns about the impact of the changes on farmers in SCEP.
Coughlan said that 84% of the female animals on commercial farms who were four or five star before the recent changes, remain in these categories.
He said that animals that dropped in the star ratings will hold their original star rating qualification status for the duration of the SCEP.
“Currently, 82% of herds have enough females in the herd to make them eligible for the next SCEP deadline at the end of 2025,” he said.
Coughlan said that ICBF will be engaging with some farmers, especially those with closed herds, in order to help them to “implement a strategy that keeps them SCEP compliant”, but “this will be a minority of herds”.
He said there “there continues to be bulls in all breeds that farmers can use to meet the requirements of SCEP”.
“ICBF are not telling framers that they need to change the breeds of cows they have on their farms.
“We have however, updated the indexes, as is international best practice, to help farmers to continue to improve the profitability and environmental efficiency of their suckler herds in response to evolving market conditions and new research findings,” he said.
The committee heard that of the bulls born in 2022 and 2023 which are yet to be sold, around 4.5% are now ineligible for SCEP.
“In 2022, only 40% of pedigree bulls sold to suckler herds were sold into SCEP herds. 60% were sold into non-SCEP herds,” Coughlan noted.
Beef index
The committee heard that the Euro-Star rating system for beef animals was introduced in 2012, with the top 20% being rated five star. The economic values used in the indices were previously updated in 2015.
The core drivers to the alterations in the index is the change in input and output prices. Data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows that input prices increased by 47% between 2020 and 2022.
“We need to ensure that the next generation of suckler animals that we are breeding, are economically and environmentally sustainable in this new era of increased output prices, but even higher input prices,” Coughlan said.
Although he said he had sympathy for breeders who would be financially impacted, Coughlan stressed that the ICBF is an independent evaluation organisation with no commercial interest in the animals they are evaluating.
ICBF runs evaluations six times per year, in particular, as new data on animal performance becomes available.
The committee heard that the “indexes continue to move and evolve like all genetic evaluations around the world”.