More than 600 farmers are expected to attend the IFA Brexit conference in Goffs next Monday, 24 April. It is important that the impressive lineup of speakers doesn’t try to sugar-coat the message and merely tells delegates what they want to hear. Brexit presents a major challenge to Irish farmers and our agri food sector and it is time to put figures on it: potential drop in export value, loss of jobs across rural Ireland, etc.

As an industry, we were slow to react to the Brexit vote and the immediate response was to play down fears and hope for the best. Unfortunately, since the outcome of the referendum last June, the more we have learned about Brexit the worse the message has become. Hoping for the best is no longer a strategy. It is clearly time for the industry to prepare for the worst.

While in recent months we have become more familiar with the figures detailing our reliance on the British market for exports, the details of how Brexit will affect this trade and the financial consequences for our industry do not appear to have been understood.

As an example, almost every presentation on Brexit includes the statistic that 60% of Irish cheddar exports are consumed in the British market. However, few go on to explain the potential implications for the dairy sector. Each year, we produce 210,000 tonnes of cheddar, accounting for over 35% of total milk production. In a hard Brexit scenario, a tariff of €1,671/t would be applied to a product currently trading at €3,000/t – clearly making future trade in the British market totally uncompetitive.

Where is this displaced milk going to fit into the product mix and are we going to see processors forced to mothball cheese plants and make further investment in dryers? Eoin Lowry goes into detail on page 23.

The same applies to the beef sector: how will the industry respond to the possibility of 50-60% tariffs being applied to 50% of our total beef exports?

The stock answer of diversifying markets amounts to kicking the can down the road – the long wait for access for Irish beef to China – the one market with decent volume potential – shows just how difficult it is to diversify markets.

At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are diversifying away from one of the highest priced beef markets in the world.

We don’t need more rhetoric on Monday. Instead, we need the industry along with Commissioner Hogan and Minister Creed to outline what steps each will take to ensure farmers’ income is protected.