Well, the time has come for my last article due to a change in farm enterprise. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been rambling on about my experiences as a beef farmer for nearly two and a half years. Many of you, as regular readers of this column, may have noticed that, rightly or wrongly, I’ve been a little negative towards the beef sector recently.

I’ve nothing against beef farming. In fact, breeding and managing livestock is something that I really enjoy, but I do not see a viable future in beef production as the margins are just too tight. The fact is, after going to all the effort of doing my best, suckler farming is still not capable of providing me with a realistic income.

The farm has got to a level where it is achieving all of the best practice targets that have been identified as essential for delivering a profitable future in suckler farming. This includes calving heifers at 24 months, producing a calf per cow per year, using AI to get the best genetics, achieving a high stocking rate and having good grassland management with extended grazing.

While all of this effort has improved the gross margin, it is not delivering where it counts – net profit. To put it into context, the best year I had in suckler farming left me with a net profit of half the minimum wage when subsidies were excluded.

Facing up to the fact that your chosen career has no future is both a daunting and exciting prospect that has led me to do a lot of soul searching.

Continuing on suckling, while ignoring the commercial realities, would be the easy option but not a satisfying one.

For me, the question was; what’s the best way to exploit Ireland’s competitive advantage of producing grass at a low cost and turning it into profit? Converting to dairying kept coming up as the most lucrative proposition.

For me, a recent comment from a new entrant to dairying sums up the possibilities that dairying holds. His breakeven prices, excluding labour, in beef were €4/kg compared with 23c/l in milk. His point was that, in a good year, beef just breaks even, while in a very bad year, milk still breaks even.

There are threats of volatility and oversupply as we approach the abolition of quotas. There are also many things to look forward to, not least the sustained increase in demand for dairy products worldwide compared with static demand for beef. Also, Ireland has the potential, through grazed grass, to be one of the lower cost producers internationally.

All that said, there are still a number of issues that I have to overcome before I’ll be cupping clusters on my own cows, not least securing a suitable block of land to start on. The home farm is simply too fragmented to even consider setting up on.

Thanks to Aurivo and Nuffield Ireland, I have been given the opportunity through a Nuffield scholarship to investigate the transfer to dairying. Thanks to the Irish Farmers Journal for this experience and to everyone who has read this column, especially for all of your comments and feedback, positive and negative.

Thanks to all the members of Teagasc who I have been privileged to work with over the past few years. Although as farmers we give them plenty of stick from time to time, we are very lucky to have such a dedicated independent advisory service compared with what’s on offer internationally.

Finally, to all who intend to stick with suckler farming, I genuinely hope that the tide turns and the primary producer receives a fairer share of the retail price. Slán.