The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) has repeated its call on Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue to postpone banding for 2023.

The farming organisation said that it has received numerous reports that banding letters are to be sent to dairy farmers by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) next month, in the middle of the spring calving period.

The ICMSA said that the timing of the introduction of the measure is "impossible" and called for it to be suspended to allow for assessment and consideration.

Reacting to the opening for applications for the 2023 nitrates derogation today (Friday, January 27), the ICMSA president Pat McCormack said that banding "will do enormous damage to the family farm model of farming".

He claimed that the measure is also driving the price of rented and leased land to "wholly unsustainable levels".

"Those implications will be viability-threatening for some farmers who could be facing a 16% reduction in cow numbers in order to remain compliant," he said.

"We now learn, via the usual drip-drip of information, that it is likely that the department will be writing to farmers next month, in the middle of the calving period, to tell them that they have to reduce by this kind of double-digit number immediately, as in the next day or the next week.

"That is going to be impossible and the department must know that," McCormack added.

"Is there any other sector of society that the government would contemplate treating with such a lack of respect and sheer thoughtlessness?

"We all know that there isn’t, and farmers have every right to feel insulted by this absolute lack of basic consideration," the ICMSA president said.