Farm income, family lifestyle and the environment - the challenges and opportunities for beef
Farmers are converging on Teagasc Grange today, June 26, for the BEEF2024 Open Day. Addressing attendees at the first stand at the open day, Pearse Kelly and Dr Paul Crosson looked at the challenges and opportunities facing the sector.
Three key areas identified were: farm income; family lifestyle; and the environment.
Looking at these individually, Kelly said: “A lot of what we will talk about today at the open day will be about improving farm income,” adding: “Farm income is important because what we want to do is get a worthwhile return for the hours that we put in to our farm.”
Depending on the system of production, whether suckler or dairy calf to beef, the key drivers of farm income are: system choice; animal health; production costs; stocking rate; liveweight gain; and fertility in a suckler context.
The key elements requiring an increased focus placing on environmental efficiency are: the carbon footprint of the product produced; water quality; biodiversity; the Bord Bia QA schemes; the introduction of more environmentally focused agri schemes; and weather extremes.
Touching on the family lifestyle element, Kelly added: “We know from many surveys and we did a survey recently, but we also know from our own National Farm Survey, that a lot of farms are working off farm. In excess of 50% are working off farm.”
A challenge created from this will be matching systems of production, farm targets and achieving a work-life balance with off-farm employment and the beef farming operation.
Kelly added: “Labour availability is becoming an issue on farm. When we stand back and look at labour availability on drystock farms, it's very much around crunch times of the year or trying to get jobs done on the farm, contractor availability, all of those things all matching in.
“While we might be wanting to push on certain things like stocking rate [an other farm income drivers], we do also have to take into account how does that impact in terms of the labour requirement on the farm.”
Delving further into the whole area of environmental sustainability, Dr Paul Crosson said: “It really straddles what you do today, but also the condition of the farm and how you hand over the farm to the next generation, so it’s really important in that context.
“We also must remember that from a consumer perspective, the whole area of environmental sustainability is critically important. We're increasingly being asked to demonstrate and indeed to improve the environmental sustainability of our food systems by the consumer, and this is getting translated now into environmental legislation and, in a positive sense, in terms of agri-environment schemes.”
Pearse Kelly’s and Paul Crosson’s full presentation from stand one of the BEEF2024 Open Day is available to view in the below video:
Information from the day, including papers, videos and boards will be made available here.