While the Irish dairy sector is heading for peak supply over the next two months, the opposite is the case for the beef industry, with weekly kill numbers easing.

Last week’s cattle kill was back more than 1,200 head to just over 34,000 head (excluding calves) and is likely to fall back to less than 32,000 head each week for the month of April.

The total processing capacity of Ireland’s beef industry is in the region of 42,000 to 44,000 head of cattle per week. The reduction in the weekly kill during April would therefore leave up to 15,000 head of spare processing capacity across the industry?, in the event that a beef factory was forced to reduce throughput or close due to a widespread outbreak of the coronavirus among employees.

It’s a similar situation in the sheep sector, with the weekly lamb kill running at about 55,000. This is well short of the industry’s processing capacity, which has reached 70,000 lambs a week for major Muslim festivals in the past.

In the pork and poultry sector, spare processing capacity is less freely available. Unlike in the beef sector, the pork and poultry processing industry in Ireland is highly concentrated, with a small number of plants processing large volumes of pork and chicken.

Moy Park in Northern Ireland is by far the largest chicken processor in the UK or Ireland and holds huge supply contracts? with supermarkets in both countries.

On the pork side, Rosderra’s sites in Offaly and Tipperary would process about 35,000 pigs a week, which is more than half of all the pigs processed in Ireland every week. Should either of Rosderra’s plants go down in the coming weeks?, it would have huge ramifications for pig farmers and secondary pork processors like Callan Bacon, which supplies rashers, sausages and other pork cuts direct to supermarkets in Ireland and the UK.

Meanwhile, up to 80 employees at ABP’s beef plant in Lurgan, Co Armagh, and 100 employees at Moy Park’s site in Portadown downed tools on Wednesday this week and walked off-site over fears of contracting the coronavirus.