There was an air of unreality about this week’s launch of the ambitious project to put in place Ireland’s largest dairy dedicated powder facility at Belview in south Kilkenny, for Glanbia.

There were euros flying as politicians and captains of industry welcomed the go–ahead for investment of over €150m in a plant which will have capacity to process over 700m litres of milk per year, from the spring of 2015.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said this Government–supported largest single dairy investment in the history of the State will create over 1,600 jobs, and contribute €400m per year to the economy, with particular benefit to farm families and rural communities.

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Farmers will need to review stocking rates, cattle types and the amount of fodder that needs to be preserved, says Cork County Councillor Frank O’Flynn.

Looking ahead to the coming winter, farmers will need to project individual estimates for silage, hay, cereals and straw. The changing climate will require greater vigilance, said Cllr O’Flynn, a farmer and a Dairygold milk adviser, as well as a Fianna Fáil representative.

“In recent weeks, I have witnessed this hardship firsthand. I have seen animals suffering due to the fodder crisis, and it is not a sight anyone would want to see,” said Mr O’Flynn. “Animals that are not fed suffer significant pain, and some cattle are not just hungry, they’ve been starving. The number of fallen animals has soared. Knackeries are unable to cope with the increase in numbers.

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The €1m fodder import scheme announced yesterday will reduce the cost of a bale of hay to farmers by about one third, according to Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney.

The fund will subsidise transport costs for co–ops importing overseas fodder from Apr 15 to May 3. Mr Coveney said that co–ops will assist non–members as well as members.

Application forms, and terms and conditions will be made available through the co–ops in the coming days. Fodder stocks have run out for many farmers, notably in Limerick and Cork, two of the most densely stocked cattle counties, with farmers under increasing financial and emotional pressure.

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 Food Safety chief defends record and rejects charges as ‘a fantastic theory’

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland was criticised by MPs for the method it used to carry out its sampling for horsemeat during a House of Commons hearing yesterday.

Labour MP Barry Gardiner alleged that the authority had privately warned the meat industry to clean up its act, but it decided to take random rather than formal samples when the industry did not heed warnings.

The allegations were made when the authority’s chief executive Alan Reilly and and its director of consumer protection Raymond Ellard appeared before the Commons committee on environment, food and rural affairs.

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Irish materials were in three beef products found to contain horse, in the EU’s latest weekly Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed.

Horse DNA at 1–5% was found in frozen meatballs in Sweden containing raw materials from Ireland; at 2% in chili con carne in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which came from Belgium, with raw material from Ireland; and at 60–90% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, in frozen meatballs from Sweden, with raw material from Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Poland. 

Italian materials were in two processed meats found to contain horse — frozen lasagne bolognese for sale in Italy and the UK; and frozen cannelloni bolognese from France, manufactured in Italy, sold in France. 

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Frightened families remain on alert as hill fires rage in West Cork and Kerry.

Gardaí have warned that the full rigours of the law will be applied to anybody maliciously setting fire to scrub land and gorse. 

Landowners in both counties traditionally set fire to thousands of acres of gorse and heather to encourage grass regrowth. Despite a deadline of Mar 1 deadline having passed, a number of residential properties have been put at risk in recent days as gorse and hill fires continue.

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 Humans have become the top priority again on hill farms.

Vegetation was the priority in 1998, when complaints made to the European Commission about over–grazing led the Department of Agriculture to embark on a seven–year programme of destocking on about one million acres of hill farm land. 

However, destocking seems to have escaped the control of department officials. Not surprisingly, it took on a life of its own when the EU introduced decoupled payments, allowing farmers to get rid of even more of their unprofitable livestock, while retaining their full payments from the EU. 

Next, the more attractive returns from off–farm employment during the Celtic Tiger era led many hill farmers to leave their flocks behind and find easier careers. And in a country which has more farmers aged over 80 than under 35, many became too old for hill farming.

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 The Irish drinks industry is a hugely important part of the Irish economy: exporting high–quality branded products worth over €1.26bn per annum; employing over 62,000 people countrywide; providing over €2bn in value add to the Irish economy; while consumers of Irish alcohol products contribute over €1.8bn through taxation to the Irish exchequer.

Further back up the supply chain, our industry offers significant support to the primary sector, purchasing quality raw materials for the premium brands for which Ireland is famous. 

In 2012 alone, €400m was spent by the Irish drinks industry on raw materials.

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Spring lambs occupy a special place in Britain’s rural idyll. As animal and meat, lamb is vested with huge symbolism, celebrated in hymns, nursery rhymes and oil paintings. Shakespeare uses the animal for both metaphor and simile. It is the meat to which an increasingly multicultural Britain turns for feast days, its versatility stretching from Sunday roast to curry to kebab. Each year Britain produces some 18 million lambs for slaughter. As Mrs Beeton observed: “Of all wild or domesticated animals, the sheep is, without exception, the most useful to man as a food.” Yet lamb is increasingly seen as a luxury, more expensive than pork, beef or poultry. Despite this, farmers have seen the price they are paid for their animals plunge, so much so that they are now losing £29 for each lamb they sell.

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There are an estimated 70,000 horses unaccounted for in Northern Ireland, Labour has claimed as the Government sought to allay fears that contaminated meat was being sold in British supermarkets. Shadow environment secretary Mary Creagh said unwanted horses were given false paperwork in Northern Ireland before being sold for 10 euro (£8) and then resold to dealers for meat for as much as 500 euro (£423). She said there was currently a “lucrative” trade in horses, claiming that while the Polish and Romanians were being “conveniently” blamed for the scandal, the contamination problem had started across the Irish Sea.

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An Bord Pleanála has granted permission for Glanbia Ingredients Ireland Ltd’s (GIIL) proposed milk powder development at the IDA site at Belview, Co Kilkenny.

GIIL currently employs about 500 people, including 320 staff at its Ballyragget facility. It expects to employ a further 70 at the new facility at Belview. It is projected up to 450 people will be employed during the construction phase. GIIL chief executive, Jim Bergin, said: “We welcome the Bord Pleanála decision which will enable GIIL to progress its milk expansion plans and to commence the development of what will be a flagship dairy processing facility. 

“We are investing circa– €180m at Belview and our existing facilities, which will both support on–farm growth and provide a major jobs and economic boost locally and nationally.” 

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 Farmers who share 7,000 commonages will have to co–operate— or risk being penalised by loss of EU payments.

However, various representatives have warned it will be impossible to get the estimated 14,000 farmers who use commonages to work together. ICMSA president John Comer has warned: “If four farmers who have sheep on a hill are dependent on one another, it is a recipe for disaster. 

“The notion of collective responsibility is lunacy. I do not know how anyone could have come up with it outside of a communist society.” 

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Greening proposals in the CAP reform will gradually reduce Ireland’s tillage industry, says Fine Gael TD for Cork East, Tom Barry.

“This is a very serious matter for the tillage industry,” he told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, during a recent debate on CAP reform. 

Mr Barry is one of the 10 members of the Teagasc Tillage Crops Stakeholder Group which recently presented a development plan for the Irish tillage crops sector to Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney.

They said there is potential to increase crops by 64%, or by an output value of €541m, creating up to 3,000 jobs.

The group said maintaining the current level of single farm payment to tillage farmers is essential.

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SLASHING funding for agri–environment schemes could have a ‘severe’ impact on farm conservation work, according to a survey of farmers undertaken by the RSPB.

European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, in conjunction with the Cypriot presidency of the EU, is proposing major cuts to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in a ‘negotiating box’ paper ahead of crucial talks on the 2014–2020 EU budget next week.

The European Commission had already proposed a 10 per cent cut to the Pillar Two rural development. Mr Van Rompuy is seeking to slash a further €8.3 billion from the budget, equating to a further 9 per cent cut.The RSPB said this compared unfavourably to the cuts of just under 5 per cent, beyond the Commission proposal, for direct payments. 

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Public health officials have recorded a 174 per cent increase in the rate of verotoxigenic e.coli (VTEC) infection this year, leading to calls for stricter controls on slurry spreading by farmers.

By October 12th, 497 cases of the infection had been notified to the Health Service Executive’s health protection surveillance centre, compared to an average of 181 notifications over the same period in the preceding three years.

“VTEC can cause severe bloody diarrhoea and stomach cramps,” Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) said, adding that the implications are “particularly serious” as it can destroy red blood cells and even cause kidney failure in young children and elderly people.

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 Farmers left with insufficient slurry capacity for the winter, due to persistent bad weather, have been reprieved by Environment Minister Phil Hogan.

They will be allowed to spread the “least amount of slurry necessary” in order to ensure they will have enough capacity to tide them over the closed period. This spreading can take place up to Friday, Nov 16. 

Additionally, there will be an earlier ending of the closed period, which will allow farmers in Zones A and B to spread slurry from Jan 1, 2013, and from 15 Jan in Zone C, subject to spreading conditions being suitable. 

Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney said: “This will allow farmers to maximise the value of slurry through early spring application, and not be forced to spread all their slurry now.”

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 A farming group has described comments by the Minister for Agriculture as ‘claptrap’, adding that he shows ‘contempt’ for Irish farming families.

The United Farmer’s Association is livid with the Minister for Agriculture, Food, and Marine Simon Coveney, because of his response to an email from Clare TD Michael McNamara on behalf of the UFA.

Minister Coveney said he had received a submission from the UFA in relation to reform of the Common Agriculture Policy and of the single farm payment in late September.He said he could ‘fully accept and can endorse many of the points made in the submission concerning the need for equity, fairness, and balance in reform of the CAP.’ 

He also agreed with the concept of full decoupling and the importance of taking into account social and environmental considerations in addition to economic considerations.

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Sir, – Naturally John Bryan as the farmers trade union leader, like all vested interests, will quote what suits his case ( Opinion, October 8th). When it comes to poor–mouthing, farmers are, and always have been, in a class of their own. 

According to the CSO figures farm incomes rose by 27 per cent in 2010 and by 30 per cent in 2011. Compounded, that amounts to 65 per cent over a two–year period. Of what other group could that be said? And the bulk of it came in handouts from the hard–pressed taxpayers at national and EU level.

There’ll be plenty of “days of action” and placard waving for the next two months but the fact is we live in a bankrupt nation and if we are to emerge from that bankruptcy farmers, like the rest of us, must be made to toe the line.

– Yours, etc, JAMES MORAN, Knockanure, Bunclody, Co Wexford. 
15 Oct 2012
The Irish Times

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Given the crises facing the planet, with the population set to reach the 9 billion mark by 2050 and increasing strains being placed on water, energy and food supplies, it would be wrong to hope there could be a single solution to the storms that lie ahead. As the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, once put it in an Observer interview: “There will be no silver bullet.” However, the population biologist added a crucial caveat. It would also be foolish not to make the maximum use of the new technologies that we are developing in order to alleviate some of the worst dangers we will face in the decades that lie ahead. And among those scientific wonders, the use of genetically modified crops has a particularly rich potential, Beddington added. “Just look at the problems that the world faces: water shortages and salination of existing water supplies, for example. GM crops should be able to deal with that.”

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Have you been wondering why your gardening has been a disaster this year? You’re not on your own. Food prices are set to rise after a summer of wet weather has hit harvests. The global price of wheat has risen by 30% over the last year. Potato harvests are down by half in some areas. The NFU’s Scottish cereal survey indicated wheat yield was down by 18% from 2011, winter barley yield down 7%, spring barley yield down 18% and winter oilseed rape yield down 26%.

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