The Irish Farmers Association (IFA) has repeated a call for the Government to be more proactive in assisting farmers facing a fodder crisis.
Farming organisations met Teagasc yesterday to outline the seriousness of the situation, particularly in the eastern and south eastern half of the country, IFA president Francie Gorman told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland.
Gorman said he had seen first-hand how the crisis was unfolding when he visited farms himself, and it was time to be proactive before the problem became worse.
“It is a really serious situation. Firstly, we can’t make grass grow when the weather doesn’t allow us to. So this is a huge cost issue on farms at the moment, as well as a workload issue at a time when farmers should be looking to have a few days off before the kids go back to school,” Gorman said.
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“One of our key asks initially was that the department will co-fund the fertiliser strategy announced by Commissioner Hanson to the maximum. There was no announcement on that yesterday. There’s a number of regulations around schemes and how farmers are allowed farm that could be looked at.
“The possible subvention of a fodder transport scheme, if fodder was available in other parts of the country to transport, to incentivise the growing of that fodder.”
The only outcome of the meeting on Tuesday was that the Fodder and Food Security Committee should meet at some time in the future, possibly next week, he said.
Gorman said a text message was sent out to farmers a week ago instructing them to do a fodder survey. “Farmers expect a little bit more action than that from our Government, from our department, and we don’t believe they realise we’ve got a serious problem,” he said.
“There’s not much point in doing a survey of a house when the house is burnt down. We know the situation. I’ve been out on the farm myself, I didn’t need to do it to confirm what the position was, but at the same time, you can’t beat being out with people on the ground, talking to them, asking them how they’re coping with the situation.
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“And when you see horticultural growers looking at possibly a reduction in the potato crop and field root crops of maybe up to 50 per cent, the harvest is going to be one of the probably poorest harvests on record, less than two million tonnes, and when you see the level of feeding that’s going on on farms, livestock farms, dairy farms, people eating into their winter fodder budgets, and what it did show us yesterday was that 40 per cent of farmers have a significant deficit in the amount of fodder they need for next winter.”
Gorman said in general at least five tonnes of fodder is needed going into the winter. In parts of Leinster only three and half tonnes is available, which means farmers are already eating into their stock.
“It doesn’t appear like the weather is going to improve in a fortnight or three weeks to allow us to make up that deficit,” he said.
When asked if the IFA wanted money or help in sourcing fodder elsewhere in the country, Gorman said, “It’s going to take both at this stage. If you would have asked me three weeks ago what was the situation here, I would have said, not as serious as it is today, we would have expected rain to come. It hasn’t come in any shape or form. Four or five mils of rain coming at a time is no use. By the time it hits the ground, it’s evaporated.
“So it’s having no material effect on our ability to grow grass, and we saw from the pasture-based analysis that Teagasc have done yesterday, that there is a huge deficit of grass growth there at this point that is unlikely to be made up between now and onset of winter.
“And it’s not like 2018 – fodder is not available across Europe or in the UK either, because they’re in a worse situation than we are.”
