Editorial: ‘stocking rate’ not key issue for dairy farms

On Wednesday, Professor Pat Dillon addressed the Teagasc National Dairy conference in Limerick with a keynote speech on water quality.

It’s probably fair to say that he was breaking new ground for a Teagasc dairy conference.

Usually, technical dairy farming issues like grass quality, the genetic base of the herd and the next shift in technology adoption required at farm level are discussed.

Pat, however, majored on explaining water quality and how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assesses water quality in Ireland.

The farm ‘stocking rate’ debate is the core issue facing the future of Irish dairy farming over the next ten years. Interestingly, Pat identified a number of actions to help water quality, and ‘stocking rate’ doesn’t feature.

He summarised the primary actions required at farm level to reduce nutrient loss to water as: increased slurry storage capacity; reduced point source loss from yards and roadways; increased use of over-winter green cover on tillage farms, and greater efficiency in the use of organic manures from intensive farming systems.

Last week, at the Irish Farmers Journal’s Dairy Day event in Cork, we heard from New Zealand farmer Corrigan Sowman, who milks 700 cows in the South Island with his brother. He outlined how stocking rate doesn’t feature either in a New Zealand context when trying to improve water quality.

They have a focus on better nutrient use, using less bag nitrogen, superior irrigation management, and getting farmers to more clearly understand catchment water measures.

Blackwater

At the Teagasc conference in Limerick, Pat Dillon showed results where rivers like the Blackwater in the heart of Cork, where milk production has doubled in parts over the last ten years, have in fact better water quality than they had ten years ago, depending on what measure you look at.

Again, you could conclude stocking rate per se hasn’t impacted negatively on river water quality.

So at the moment, our industry is having an argument on stocking rate – 170, 220 or 250 kg of organic nitrogen per hectare.

Yet it doesn’t feature in the summary action list from the Director of Research at Teagasc or in New Zealand. There is something seriously wrong when this is the case. It means farmers are not focused on the right measures to improve water quality.

This stocking rate row is core to why the handbrake is pulled on farm investment here in Ireland. Farmers don’t know where future stock numbers are going to land.

Teagasc director Prof Frank O’Mara suggested in Limerick that 20% extra slurry storage and 33% extra soiled water storage per dairy farm might be required.

He qualified this by saying the research work is ongoing, and every farmer must make up their own mind on what to do about it.

Why would you build a slurry storage tank and spend anything upwards of €100,000 if, in two years, you might have to reduce herd numbers by 10%, 20% or 30%? All capital investment like this is dependent on cashflow and repayment capacity, which is very different if milking 70 cows instead of 100.

Irony

The other ironic piece with the ‘stocking rate’ row is that it is signalling to farmers to force up milk yield per cow.

That means you move closer to the Northern Ireland problem, where phosphorus surplus becomes an issue alongside the profitability challenge.

So in summary, we need to change the focus away from the ‘stocking rate’ row. We need longer lead in times for farmers on potential investments, potential penalties and in EU water quality reviews and legislation.

Without some medium to long-term planning, we risk suffocating a potentially positive Irish dairy industry. On the slurry storage ‘invest or not’ challenge, Pat Dillon suggests there is some element of a chicken and egg problem with this.

However, he reckons some farms need more slurry storage anyway, and unless we fix that at farm level, we won’t see water quality improve long-term.