ICMSA president Pat McCormack said that Minister for Agriculture McConalogue’s remarks implying that cow numbers cannot continue rising if the State is to meet its environmental targets avoids the core question of how we reconcile the reduction of carbon emissions with a growing global population.

McCormack said: “Any logical answer to that conundrum has to start from the obvious logic of locating milk production in regions where it is most carbon efficient and, in the case of milk, that meant Ireland.

“That has to be the starting point and focus should be on the issues that will make us even more carbon-efficient like MACC and the other policy tools that would ‘fine-tune’ the various components that should inform optimum cow numbers on a given platform.”

The Tipperary dairy farmer was critical of what he called “half-explanations that infuriate farmers”.

“What I mean by ‘half-explanation’ is the observation that milk supplies are growing without ever mentioning the fact that the reason why volumes had to grow was because the food-supply system – and the politicians who oversaw that – decided that they weren’t going to give farmers a fair margin,” he said.

Reasonable margin

“What they effectively said was that they wouldn’t give us a reasonable margin on our milk, but if we wanted to produce more milk and make up on volume what we were losing on margin, then they wouldn’t object to that. That’s what has happened.

“The really damaging part of this kind of comment is the continuing pretence that all the change involved in meeting environmental targets can happen from the supermarkets backwards,” the ICMSA president said.

“That somehow, the farmers – and just the farmers – will have to make all the changes and bear all the astronomical costs involved in this revolutionary change to low-emissions farming and food-production. That the corporate retailers and their customers can just go on paying the lowest prices that they feel like, while the farmers re-invent themselves as subsistence producers who ‘carry the climate can’ for everyone else.”

“When are we going to hear Minister McConalogue or any senior figure in our farming or agri-food sector break the news to the consumers and the retailers that food prices are going to rise as we rediscover that producing real food involves a real cost?” asked McCormack.