This week’s Teagasc 2022 Outlook conference merely served to confirm a reality that many farmers have been pushing to the back of their minds for some time.
But now it’s official – all farm inputs will rise significantly over the next 12 months. The one exception to this role of thumb is electricity, and more of that anon.
But it’s not all bad news. As we look towards 2022, the prospects of farmgate prices for milk, beef, lamb and cereals are looking reasonably positive, at least into the medium-term.
I am old enough to remember times when agricultural margins were being squeezed at both ends of the farm production chain.
How will this outlook affect farmers?
So what are farmers to make of all this? Obviously, there are some realities that cannot be changed.
There is a very healthy area of winter cereal and rape crops already in the ground. And they will have to be managed to best effect over the coming months.
From an overall perspective, I see the challenges arising over the next year as being a dry run for what’s coming down the track, where climate change is concerned.
The scope to make better use of organic manures, improve grass utilisation and, generally improve efficiency levels across almost every farming business in Ireland, is immense. So, let’s get started I say!
Not surprisingly, it’s a case of starting with the low lying fruit. Even on our very best grassland farms, the scope to improve grass production and utilisation, relative to what can be achieved in trial environments, is immense.
So is it not time that we really started to really look at why there is such a performance drop once our best grass varieties are grown on commercial farms.
Sticking with grassland, the amount of silage ending up as waste on vast numbers of farms never ceases to amaze me.
I know that silage is not recognised as the primary source of forage on many beef and dairy farms. But, surely, it doesn’t take that much extra effort and expense to make sure that grass is ensiled property and that feed-out losses are minimised.
Moving livestock
When margins get tight on livestock farms the decision to move-on those animals not carrying their weight is an easy one to make. This is especially the case during those periods when beef and sheep prices are holding up well.
When all is said and done, the people who are facing into the genuine unknown during the early months of 2022 are those tillage farmers who traditionally grow spring barley.
For some, the option of looking at malting barley will be worth pursuing, others might look at spring beans and other protein crops.
One approach should help deliver a better price while the other will act to reduce the amount of fertiliser nitrogen required to actually grow legumes.
Many Irish feed compounders are now seeking to actively extol the virtues of homegrown cereals and proteins in their rations. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in 2022.
I referred to the outlook that electricity prices are not set to increase in 2022. Does this mean that renewables are, at last, making a real dent in Ireland’s heretofore reliance on fossil fuels?
If this is the case, then surely it opens up so many new and exciting options in terms of how energy is utilised across agriculture and Irish society as a whole.