Iceland is an odd country. A beautifully odd country. It has a famous geyser which erupts water 100ft into the air on average every three minutes. It has the most number of waterfalls per capita in the world. It has a population of just 320,000 people. There are just 120 people incarcerated in the country’s prison and a quarter of those are bankers who nearly brought down its economy in 2008.
It has volcanoes beside glaciers, it has lava fields of solidified magma next to luscious fields full of green grass and it has a summer with 24-hour daylight as well as a six-month winter when the sun never shines.
With all these extremes, it might be hard to see how there is any viable farming, but Iceland, like Ireland, has a thriving agriculture sector, with work often being carried out in challenging and unpredictable conditions.
The landscape is quite something. Almost 85% of the island is totally uninhabitable as a result of volcanoes, lava fields, glaciers, mountains and lakes, but yet there are productive farmers.
According to the Farmers Association of Iceland, there are a total of 3,045 farms on the island, with agriculture contributing 6% to Iceland’s €17bn GDP. The average farmer is 52 years old, with the average dairy holding having 35 cows and the average sheep farm having 300 ewes. There are 25,500 dairy cows and 448,000 sheep.
The average dairy farmer works about 90 hours a week, with sheep farmers working approximately half that. The main crops on the island are hay, silage and barley. Some 11,000t of barley and 1,800t of silage are grown by farmers each year. These crops are used for dairy cows primarily.
The main farming sectors are dairy, sheep and horses. The Icelandic horse is an unusual beast. It has a unique fifth gait, which allows it to glide over the rough terrain.
During a recent trip to the country, the Irish Farmers Journal called into two farmers. Both happened to be in dairy and, despite being some 3,500km from Ireland, many of the challenges and opportunities are same there as here.
“Yes, I have the McHale. It is a great machine. I use it in the summer and many other of my neighbours have McHale too,” Barne Kvlesson said as he pointed proudly to the McHale fusion baler sitting outside his shed, freshly washed after completing the second cut of silage. “McHale is a great baler. We have tried others, but this is certainly the best.”
Barne and his father Kvles (that is how Barne’s surname is Kvlesson; he is the son of Kvles) farm in one of the more unusual parts of Iceland.
They milk 50 Icelandic cows on 20 acres of grazing ground, but the vast majority of that is scrub and mountain land. They also have ground for silage and hay to feed during the long winter months.
Paul Danielson is something of a famous individual in Iceland. On his land is the (in)famous volcano called, and bear with us, Eyjafjallajökull, which grounded most of European air traffic in 2010. The volcanic ash played havoc with airspace and cost the airline sector hundreds of millions of euro. “Yeah, that’s my volcano,” Danielson joked.
Danielson milks 60 cows in an old-style rail milking system, but he expects to milk more cows as there is a demand for it.
“The government wants us to milk more cows and produce more milk ... there seems to be a big demand for milk here,” he said.
Icelanders consume a whopping 183 litres of milk and dairy products per captia each year. This is 0.8l behind Finland, which is the largest consumer of dairy in the world.
The Icelandic dairy sector is performing admirably. There are just 600 dairy farmers on the island, with all those selling their milk to one processor, MS Iceland. In case you’re wondering, MS stands for Mjólkursamsalan.
Price paid to farmers
Farmers are receiving 86 Icelandic krona for every litre of milk produced, which equates to approximately 64c/litre. This is three times the price Irish dairy farmers are getting at present.
The country is self-sufficient for dairy produce but is urging farmers to expand in order to export more cheese and yoghurt to other European countries. The country has to be self-sufficient for dairy produce as there are massive import tariffs of more than 200% to get dairy produce into the country. The tarrifs have been in place since the mid-1980s.
The Icelandic cow, the only cow type on the island, produces approximately 4,300 litres per year, with an average butterfat of 4.15% and protein of 3.8%, and an average of 352kg MS/cow. It is this milk which goes into Iceland’s pride and joy, the ancient yogurt known as Skyr.
Atalsteinn Magnusson, head of sales with MS Iceland told the Irish Farmers Journal that Skyr is now being sold outside of Iceland too.
“Skyr yogurt is being sold in Ireland, just recently in the UK and also in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland. We have seen good growth in that,” he said. Due to import tariffs into the EU also, Skyr for the European market is being processed and distributed through a Danish supplier.
Iceland has seen a 40% increase in sales of Skyr yogurt over the past three years, with Magnusson attributing its spike in demand to increased visitor numbers to the country.
Milk also goes to make up its domestic liquid milk market as well as domestic cheese and butter sectors.
While the positives are strong prices and good domestic growth, which is protected by import tariffs, the negatives come in the form of weather and the limitations of the much-loved Icelandic cow. While her solids are very impressive, the overall volume she can produce is proving to be insufficient to sustain the growth in demand for dairy products.
Each 100g pot of Skyr delivers 15g of protein but it takes about four cups of milk to make every pot.
There are calls to introduce more Norwegian Red cows to add more milk to the overall milk pool but farmers are resisting the moves in order to protect the traditional Icelandic cow.
However, for Danielson, the future is bright for farming in Iceland.
“It is not easy at many times of the year. It can get very cold but my father has farmed here and I am farming here. We will continue to farm here as it is our way of life,” he said.