The president of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) Dermot Kelleher has claimed that December 31 scheme deadlines set by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) are “unworkable” and must be extended.
Kelleher said that the farming organisation has received “quite a lot” of calls from farmers who are destressed about these deadlines.
He pointed to the deadline for slurry movements and the deadline for getting genomic samples to laboratories under the National Genotyping Programme.
ICSA
The ICSA president has now called on Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue and the department to extend the deadlines up to the end of January “to alleviate totally unfair stress on farmers”.
“The reality is that the December 31 deadline is beset with practical problems, and this is particularly true of 2023.
“Farmers got texts just before Christmas urging them to get things done at a time when this just isn’t easy.
“For example, texts went out on the evening of December 22 telling farmers that they must have their genomic samples in the lab in December.
“But December 22 was a Friday evening, and the following Monday and Tuesday were Christmas and Stephens Day. This left them just two working days to get samples sent off and again December 30 and 31 were weekend days with no post,” Kelleher said.
“There was no practical appreciation of how challenging this was given that farmers also are snowed under with normal feeding and other farming work.
“It is also important to note that the deadline specified was that samples would be in the laboratory by December 31, which the farmer clearly had no control over due to postal limitations etc,” he added.
The ICSA president also said that a lot of farmers had not met the December 31 deadline to accept slurry imports.
“In some cases, farmers rely on their planners to do this, but planners were simply not available at Christmas to deal with all of this.
“We now have a lot of stressed farmers who are worried about the slurry exports/imports and it is unnecessary,” he said.