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The Teagasc road maps for 2027 have been dressed in green to reflect the new demands on Teagasc to align to EU policy as translated by our Department of Agriculture.
The industry targets announced this week see some target movement and some new targets.
As far as I can recall, the last Teagasc road maps were published in 2016 (about four years ago) and that was supposed to give direction to what the various sectors might look like to 2025.
That 2025 dairy road map has been removed from the Teagasc archive and, obviously, Teagasc was told to go back to the drawing board and create new targets for a much-changed EU policy climate.
Dairy
On the dairy side, Teagasc has rowed back on grass utilisation targets by 2t. Instead of aiming for 10.9t/ha by 2025, the target announced this week is that the industry should reach 8.9t by 2027.
So it’s down 2t and the industry gets another two years to shape up.
The EBI target for 2025 was to move EBI from €119 to €210, but the new industry target is now €140 EBI based on the base recalibration and over-estimation fixes introduced.
The-six week calving rate target is down from an 80% target in 2016 to 78% for 2027 and the SCC target has been further reduced from 200 SCC by 2025 to 150 SCC by 2027.
New targets for nitrogen use efficiency, biodiversity, slurry by LESS and GHG targets have been set to help guide dairy farmers on what’s important now.
Beef
On the beef side, a road map for dairy beef has been established and a separate road map for sucklers.
On the suckler side, the volume of grass to be utilised has been pitched higher (from 6.2t in 2025 to 7.2t for 2027).
Slightly fewer calves per cow is targeted - instead of aiming for 0.9 calves per cow, the target now is 0.87 calves per cow per year.
The cost base target has been tightened up and instead of aiming for €2/kg liveweight (>€4kg carcase), now the production cost target is €3.64/kg carcase.
Sheep
The Teagasc road map for sheep farmers is to target more output from the same 2025 stocking rate target of nine ewes per hectare.
This is brought about by a slightly higher number of weaned lambs per ewe (1.4 to 1.55 lambs per ewe) and a target for more output per hectare (250kg to 280kg/ha).
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