Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney has said he hopes Irish co-ops will include tillage farmers if they are rolling out any new credit instruments or farm finance schemes. Speaking during the Irish Farmers Journal general election debate, streamed live on www.farmersjournal.ie on Thursday night, Minister Coveney said a new finance product for farmers will be unveiled by one of the Irish co-ops in the coming days.

“Within the next couple of days, we are going to see a new product that is partially financed by the European Investment Bank and available for dairy farmers that’s coming through one of the co-ops,” said the minister. When pressed if the new finance instrument would be made available by the co-op to tillage farmers, the minister said he hoped yes would be the answer.

Recent reports suggest the Irish co-op the minister referred to that will unveil this new farm finance model for its members is Glanbia. However, when contacted by the Irish Farmers Journal on the matter, the processor was remaining tight-lipped, saying it could not “confirm, deny or even acknowledge” if it was looking at introducing any new scheme.

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Volatility measures

Also during the debate, Minister Coveney was firm when he said the recent abolition of quotas was not linked to the current downturn in global dairy markets.

“What we have is a temporary supply and demand problem in terms of dairy products, for powders mainly,” he said. “The reason for that is we have had very cheap feed for four years in a row, which has been bad news for arable farmers, but what it has done is produce a lot more milk worldwide. We also have had a country like China probably over-buying two years ago and having a lot in stock.”

The minister said that while the EU could make some changes around private storage aid and the intervention price could be increased, there was still a lot Irish co-ops can do at home to try to insulate better against price volatility for its members.

“We are now seeing dairy co-ops putting fixed price contracts in place. Dairygold announced its scheme two weeks ago for nearly 31c/l for 15% of its milk for its members,” he said. “Glanbia has already done that, so has Kerry and we’re looking at putting a futures market in place so that smaller co-ops can actually insure against price volatility by selling futures.”