Majority of farmers seeking ICBF changes

The Irish Farmers Journal completed an online survey last weekend of beef farmers on their attitudes to the current situation in relation to ICBF and pedigree breed societies. There were 336 responses to the survey along with a huge amount of comments on the current debacle.

This week we take a look at the survey results while next week we will profile some of the farmer views and comments on where things have to go to move on from the current mess.

Ninety percent of the farmers that replied to the survey were suckler farmers. There was a pretty even split on the question as to whether they bred pedigree cattle with 53% of respondents answering yes and 47% answering no.

There has been some talk around the current issue being a pedigree issue with the problems being stirred up by a select few people. This survey would indicate that the problems are much greater than a pedigree problem with a huge amount of ordinary commercial farmers not happy with the current set up on figures.

New SCEP scheme

Seventy five percent of respondents have at some point participated in SCEP or BDGP with 25% not finishing out the five years of BDGP or joining the new SCEP scheme.

Interestingly though, on the question of whether they would join a new SCEP scheme in 2028, 49% said they would while 51% said they wouldn’t join a new scheme.

This would indicate that farmers would still be interested in joining a suckler support scheme. Fifty five percent of respondents use the replacement and terminal index when purchasing animals while 45% do not use the ICBF indexes as a tool.

When asked why this is the case, inaccuracy was one of the main answers given.

On the question of whether suckler cow supports should be linked to meeting genetic targets, almost 63% said that supports should not be linked to payments, while 37% were happy for supports to be linked.

When asked whether breed societies have taken the correct decision to not print genetic indexes in their sale catalogues, 68% of farmers felt this was the correct decision while 32% felt it was not.

This result could have been swayed with a larger proportion of pedigree farmers responding to the survey.

Right decision?

On the question of whether ICBF/Teagasc should make changes to the genetic index makeup in order to address pedigree breed society concerns, the vast majority of farmers (87%) felt that changes where needed while 13% felt no changes were necessary.

When asked if ICBF had taken the right decision to stick to their guns in the makeup of the replacement and terminal indexes, 81% said no, while 19% said yes.

The survey highlights the huge amount of frustration that exists in suckler circles around the makeup of the current indexes.

We could fill 20 pages of this week’s paper with the comments received as part of the survey and some of these comments will be profiled in next weeks Irish Farmers Journal.

In separate analysis, we obtained the number of farmers that have left SCEP since they joined and these details are outlined in Table 1.

Just over 4,500 farmers have exited the scheme since they joined with some having to pay back money received.

In terms of numbers, Galway had the highest number of farmers to drop out – at 575 – with Monaghan having the highest percentage drop out at 31%. The largest number of SCEP participants are in Mayo which has 1578 farmers participating in the scheme. There are currently 16351 farmers participating in the SCEP scheme.