It will take many weeks for farmers to clear up the mess left after storm Eowyn hit last Friday.

While clearing trees and fixing fences is time-consuming, it is the damage done to sheds that causes the most inconvenience and can come at a high cost. In some areas, even relatively modern sheds were impacted, although in most cases it is older housing that bore the brunt of the storm.

That highlights a vulnerability in our industry that is often largely forgotten – many local farms are highly reliant on buildings erected during grant schemes in the 1970s and 1980s that are coming to the end of their working life.

Doing any sort of significant building work comes at a high cost and that cost is difficult to justify given the prevailing margins in sectors such as beef and sheep. Perhaps then it is no great surprise that despite the record prices seen over the last year, there is no sign of any great appetite among farmers to keep more suckler cows and breeding ewes.

Normally, economic theory would suggest producers respond to higher prices by increasing supply, which then pushes supply above demand, resulting in a market downturn. However, at the moment, higher prices seem to be having the exact opposite impact on beef and sheep producers in NI.

That is most evident in our suckler sector, with June 2024 census results showing numbers down 4% to a 37-year low of 226,000 head. Across all of 2024, just over 200,000 calves were registered to a suckler dam – down over 16% on the previous year, with almost 40,000 fewer calves born.

Of course, infrastructure on farms is only one of many reasons for that. Late springs don’t help, nor does increased incidence of bovine TB.

As an industry we also seem to be breeding cattle that are increasingly hard to calve and increasingly dangerous to handle around calving time.