The average income of a family farm increased by 49 per cent in 2025, a national survey conducted by Teagasc has found, jumping from €36,229 to €53,842.
The year “2025 was, generally, a good year for most farming enterprises”, said Frank O’Mara, director of the Agriculture and Food Development Authority. “But there is huge volatility, year to year, in farm income; if you went back to 2023, it was a very, very bad year for most enterprises.”
The 2023 average family farm income was below €20,000. O’Mara explained that the year was “so challenging” because of “poor weather leading to higher costs”, such as needing to buy “a lot more constant feed” for cows, which ultimately “didn’t perform as well as usual”.
“We see volatility as part and parcel of farm incomes now, which isn’t a great forecast,” he said, noting the prices for pigs, milk and beef dropped towards the end of 2025. “We anticipated [the prices for beef] would remain strong in 2026, but as it turned out, they also fell quite a bit in the first six months of the year.”
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Spikes in prices for fertiliser, feed and fuel provoked by conflict in Ukraine are yet to fully subside, said research officer Trevor Donnellan. He added that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has compounded this issue and led to “extreme volatility” in farmers’ yearly income.
Yet the preliminary results of the national farm survey released on Monday show “a sharp improvement” in the number of farms “considered economically viable”, noted Teagasc in its report.
A farm is deemed economically viable by the authority if it “can remunerate family labour at the minimum agricultural wage and provide a 5 per cent return on the capital invested in non-land assets”.
Some 54 per cent of the more than 88,000 farms surveyed countrywide were deemed economically viable, but this figure varies significantly depending on what the farm produces: as high as 91 per cent of dairy farms were economically viable, yet only 40 per cent of sheep farmers were deemed the same.
A farm is “economically vulnerable” when it does not meet the viability criteria and “if neither the farmer nor the spouse works off the farm”.
Twenty per cent of all farms surveyed were deemed vulnerable, with the figure rising to 26 per cent of cattle farmers in the country who do not focus on breeding the animal but instead buy them from other farmers and sell them to factories.
Emma Dillon, a senior research officer at Teagasc, found “there was a 7 per cent increase in the debt held by Irish farmers, amounting to €1.6 billion in total”. Over half of this was held by dairy farmers, she said, adding that “66 per cent of all farms have no farm-related debts on their books”.
