"Stagnant" prices, high inputs and TB are among the issues Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon must prioritise, a farm organisation has said.

Speaking following a meeting this week with Minister Heydon, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) has urged the government to "prioritise specific issues on which action was most urgently required".

ICMSA president Denis Drennan said: "As far as ICMSA is concerned, it’s all about income.

"We look at a situation where milk and beef prices are still below the cost of production, input costs are still at an excessively high level, and we want an unswerving focus by government on getting farmer prices up and farmer costs down - it’s really that simple."

Milk price

Referencing ICMSA's traditional focus on milk price, Drennan rejected the idea that dairy markets are slowly correcting.

He said that even if that is the case, then it is "too low and slow".

Drennan said the ICMSA has repeated its call for the introduction of an EU-wide milk supply voluntary reduction scheme to "speed up a rebalancing of the market and signal the fall in volumes that is going to get buyers back into the market".  

He said the "lack of urgency" at EU level on the collapse in milk price is "astonishing, and compounded by the fact that the EU already had an effective policy response at hand".

“Farmers struggle to understand why the European Commission and our own government seem content to act as bystanders in these circumstances when there’s a cost-effective and proven method of putting a floor under the market and beginning to restore confidence," Drennan said.

CAP

On the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2027, ICMSA has repeated its calls for an increased budget and for direct supports to be targeted at food producers. 

While welcoming Minister Heydon's commitment to simplification, Drennan said that had to mean simplification "for the farmers - not the civil servants and administrators".   

In relation to TB, Drennan told the minister that the Department of Agriculture's communications around the new requirements to farmers had been "hit-and-miss".

The ICMSA said that certain matters remained unaddressed - that compensation ceilings needed to be raised, and the losses suffered by farmers only allowed to sell animals to controlled finishing units have to be looked at.

The ICMSA president said also that a plan of action on nitrates is "desperately required", and that it would "give some degree of predictability to the farmers concerned".

Drennan stressed that the ICMSA "wants action and progress on these and we are satisfied that the minister understands that".