Farmer writes: gauging the quality in Quality Assurance

I’ll start by telling you a yarn. A couple of weeks ago, I got a visit from a Japanese restaurant which wanted a promotional shot of sheep and sunrise on the farm here. They got in touch with their distributor who got in touch with the primary processor who got in touch with me.

It was a great example of the traceability system we have it place. The lamb for the restaurant traced right back to the ear tag in the flock in Co Meath.

That brought me on to the Quality Assurance (QA).

I have absolutely no problem with the notion of the QA scheme. I do believe that it is 100% necessary for our sector. While I’m throwing out unpopular opinions, I think we should have 100% EID in sheep and the Department should have brought it in from day one but that’s for another day.

The bottom line is we need QA in some shape or form as part of our sales strategy as a country; not as individuals but as a collective we need it going forward.

We are totally export dependent.

Like it or not, we have to dance to the tune of our customers and our customers, ultimately, are the consumers.

We cannot expect them to buy something from our farms if we do not dot every ‘‘i’’ and cross every ‘‘t’’.

We hear all the time from industry leaders that we are aiming for niche markets, high-end retailers and Michelin-star restaurants. They demand a product with a story and provenance.

Personally, I think 99.9% of the produce we provide meets these specifications as it stands every day.

The problem I have with it is nobody can give me a clear answer on one thing.

Bear with me and I will explain. The auditor visits us and spends 25 to 30 minutes out on the farm. They then return to the office for three to four hours and go through the important stuff, the paperwork, which has to be done. Traceability as we are told is the key to this scheme, the audit passes our farm hassle-free and animals are quality-assured.

We bring our animals to the factory and you are asked if they are quality-assured. To which my answer is always yes. A few hours pass by and the kill sheet is in your hand along with the much-needed cheque minus the QPS bonus on a lovely R+ 4+ heifer.

She has fallen outside the quality bonus and I lose out.

My question is this: does the processor then market that animal as QA or not?

After years of asking, I still haven’t been able to find out the answer to that.