While recognising the difficult financial state of both the dairy and pig sectors, the leaders of the main agri companies in Northern Ireland remain relatively bullish about what lies ahead.

At a launch of the NI Food and Drink Association (NIFDA) pre-election manifesto at Stormont this week, NIFDA chair David Dobbin had a clear message for MLAs – help us to support future growth.

He pointed out that the agri-food industry is the largest contributor to sales, exports and employment within NI manufacturing and created 4,000 jobs during the recent recession.

NIFDA believes that there is the potential to create another 15,000 new jobs in the sector by 2020. Its wishlist for Government includes faster progress on an agri-food marketing body to drive exports, Government to work with industry to draw up a delivery plan for future growth and for action to be taken to reduce the high cost of energy in NI.

Despite the positivity, Dobbin also recognised that there are many challenges ahead.

They include the new National Living Wage, which he said would put another £1m of cost on to his own business. He said that the only way to offset that was to increase productivity and efficiency.

He had a similar message for farmers, who he said must be more cost-competitive. He used the range in costs of production within benchmarking performance to highlight the point, although recognised that some dairy farmers invested heavily at the wrong time and need support through the crisis.

With a spring flush of milk coming, he questioned whether there is sufficient capacity to deal with all this milk. That will drive prices down further and inevitably will mean that some dairy farmers will have no option but to cut back or stop producing milk.

“Milk prices will continue to fall. Hopefully, by the end of the year, the market will start to recover, but before that it will be a real rough ride,” he said (see page 60).

Longer-term, various local dairy stakeholders are to work on possible hedging mechanisms or futures contracts, but that will come too late to stave off this crisis.