The 2026 beef kill is unlikely to pass last year’s record beef kill of 1.6 million head, senior manager meat and livestock with Bord Bia Joe Burke has said.

Speaking at the Irish Farmers Journal’s beef markets information meeting in Abbeyleix, Co Laois, on Monday night, he said throughput is currently down 64,000 head compared with last year.

“On average over the spring months last year, the kill was 35,000 [head]. The average now is about 31,000, so there’s been a bit of a push back.

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“We’ve seen a slight backlog develop, when processors have been buying cattle a couple of weeks before processing. That is one of the factors that farmers have found very difficult over recent weeks,” he said.

He said last year’s beef kill was a record year and that given the number of cattle in the system, “we will catch up to some extent, but it’s unlikely to pass out 1.6 million throughput we had last year”.

He said that the kill number may be compensated by slightly higher carcase weights.

Beef prices

The average beef price was €7.30c/kg, excluding VAT, in 2025, Burke outlined.

“That was unprecedented and it mirrored what happened in the UK and around Europe,” he said.

Unfortunately, since last autumn, we’ve seen some of the impact of that high price, he added.

“With high prices tends to come high volatility,” he said, adding that beef prices have declined by 36c/kg on average compared with the beginning of January.

With high prices tends to come high volatility

“It was upwards of €7.70/kg last year, we’re a long way behind that, 40c/kg behind the price at the beginning of the year,” he said.

Burke said that on average in the UK currently, the equivalent price for an R3 bullock is £7.35/kg - 50c/kg more than prevailing prices here in Ireland.

He said that it is worth pointing out that the average price paid in the UK is down 25p/kg since the start of the year.

“EU average cattle prices are much more stable, but we’ve also seen a slight decline - down around 10c/kg since the beginning of the year,” he said.

“We can appreciate the mood in the room...the disappointment that’s there of the prices that have prevailed since the beginning of the year,” he said.

Stay tuned to the Irish Farmers Journal online for more.