IFA seeks to join feed ingredient labelling case

By Paul Mooney

IFA will today (Thursday) seek High Court permission to join the ongoing case on feed ingredient labelling claiming the issue is of vital importance to livestock farmers.

The High Court case is being taken by six millers against the Department of Agriculture in a bid to overturn new legislation that would make full declaration of ingredients obligatory. The millers are Greenvale Animal Feeds, Connollys, Smyth's Daleside Feeds, Dan O'Connor Feeds, Stewart Corn Mills and AW Ennis.

Declaration of ingredients by percentage will allow farmers make direct cost comparisons between different rations and will increase competition between mills, Matt Merrick, the organisation's South Leinster vice president has sworn in an affidavit to be submitted today.

"Farmers are required to provide traceability and assurance on their produce,'' he said yesterday (Wednesday). "The food scares of the last decade can be traced back to consignments of contaminated compound feeds. To complete the circle on assurance and traceability farmers are entitled to know exactly what they are feeding,'' he said.

Because there is no universally accepted system for measuring metabolisable energy in ruminant rations, there is scope to misrepresent the ME content of a ration, he claimed. "The only objective method by which farmers can assess the potential performance of a given feed is by knowing the percentage inclusion of the different ingredients,'' he said.

Farmers purchased over 3.4m tonnes of compound animal feed in 2003 at a cost of over €700 million.