The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has called for indefinite postponement of the cow banding proposal for 2023 under the Nitrates Action Programme (NAP).
ICMSA president, Pat McCormack, has repeated his call for both the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue to postpone the proposal.
With just weeks until 2023, McCormack claimed that neither the department nor farmers are remotely prepared to implement the new regime in 2023, and that pushing ahead with the plans will result in “utter chaos”.
“We are currently eighteen days away from January 1, 2023 when the proposed nitrate cow banding is supposed to be coming into effect, but general confusion still reigns.
“And many, if not most, farmers still have only a vague understanding of what the new banding system will entail and what it means for their farm,” he said.
Cow banding
Currently, the excretion rate for all dairy cows is 89kg of organic nitrogen (N)/cow. But under the proposed NAP revisions, higher yielding cows will be given a higher level of N excretion due to their larger feed intake requirements.
The bands will be based on milk yield replacing the current 89kg of organic N/cow.
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is consulting the industry on the establishment of three tiers of excretion band.
Bands Milk yields Excretion rate Band 1 <4,500kg of milk 80kg organic N/cow Band 2 4,500-6,500kg of milk 92kg organic N/cow Band 3 >6,500kg of milk 106kg organic N/cow
The ICMSA president claimed that farmers have not received any correspondence from the department to date explaining the new nitrate rules, which he said will drastically affect the way individual farms are run.
He warned that “hundreds if not thousands” of farmers have already made farm-level decisions, which will be severely undermined by the proposed regulations.
NAP
McCormack said that any such change in nitrates regulations should be communicated to farmers in the previous springtime to the proposed introduction, so farmers could alter their breeding strategy.
“Neither the farmer, nor the department, nor the banding system itself is ready for the nitrate banding system to come into effect in 18 days.
“The department needs to postpone the nitrate banding to allow themselves time to develop a proper and fair regime that will emerge from proper and fair consultation with farmer representatives, that gives farmers sufficient time to adjust their farming practices, if required,” he said.
The ICMSA president criticised the suggestion that if a farmer does not sign over permission to their co-op or Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) to share their information with the department, they will be put into the highest band until proved otherwise.
“Threatening people and this kind of bureaucratic extortion is never justified, particularly when it is employed to cover up their own administrative deficiencies,” McCormack added.