ICBF announces decision to postpone Beef Stakeholder Forum
The Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) is set to postpone the Beef Stakeholder Forum which was originally set to take place tomorrow (Wednesday, March 5).
The move comes following correspondence from the Pedigree Cattle Breeders Council to the ICBF which indicated that the Pedigree Cattle Breeders Council would not be attending the meeting.
The Pedigree Breeders Council represents 20 Irish beef and dairy cattle breed societies and Seamus Nagle from the Irish Salers Society is the current chair of the council.
In a statement issued to the beef stakeholder group, the ICBF said: "The Beef Stakeholder Forum scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday, March 5) is being postponed until further notice.
"We [ICBF] have received correspondence from the Pedigree Cattle Breeders Council indicating that they would not be attending tomorrow’s meeting.
"In the interest of creating space to allow us to respond to that communication and to create the necessary environment to ensure on-going progress, the forum is postponed until further notice."
The Pedigree Breeders Council hosted a meeting for its members on Monday, March 3, where it reached the decision that it would not be attending the Beef Stakeholder Forum on Wednesday.
It's statement to the ICBF detailed a number of reasons why it has decided not to attend including issues with minutes from the meetings and what it says are "glaring mistakes and problems with the [Euro-Star Index] model".
The Pedigree Breeders Council statement said the entity is "not shutting the door on future forum meetings" but added that "to move forward from this point, this relationship is going to have to become a lot more professional".
"Our livelihoods and the integrity of our herdbooks are at stake. It’s about time the ICBF and Teagasc recognised the full impact their fundamentally flawed system is having on the national herd," according to the Pedigree Breeders Council statement.
Last month, ICBF CEO Sean Coughlan confirmed that the economic values of the Euro-Star indices will be updated this summer [2025].
Speaking to Agriland on the AgriFocus podcast in February, Coughlan confirmed that the agreement was reached at the ICBF stakeholder forum.
Coughlan said: “The change to the economic model that happened back in November of 2023 is still having some repercussions, there’s no doubt.
“At that point and time, it was clear in the post-Covid era that costs had risen significantly. Beef prices had increased but maybe not at the same pace so that has definitely created a lot of frustration out there.
“I think one of the things that has come out of the stakeholder forum is we agreed we would not wait as long again to actually update the economic values, and we have committed to updating those economic values again this summer,” he added.
He confirmed that work is already underway on updating the economic values and is being led by Teagasc’s beef enterprise leader Dr. Paul Crosson.
The ICBF CEO said: “I think one of the areas that will obviously get a reasonable jump is going to be beef price for example, because that has risen significantly and I think the outlook for beef price is a lot more positive.”
Coughlan also confirmed that farmer-recorded data will be used as part of the evaluations from this summer onwards.
Weights recorded by farmers for the Suckler Carbon Efficiency Programme (SCEP) are not currently used in the evaluations but weights recorded by technicians are used. The Stakeholder Forum has agreed that all weights will be used from this summer onwards.
Coughlan also said that updates in relation to foreign data on calving difficulty will be included from this summer onwards and a weanling price trait will also be added “to give further credit to weanling producers”, according to the ICBF CEO.
Click here to listen to the full interview with ICBF CEO Sean Coughlan.
