This was IFA national dairy committee chairman Sean O’Leary’s provocative way of summing up the topic for next week’s joint IFA/FCStone Conference. 'Making risk management work for farmers' takes place on Wednesday 4 May in The Heritage Hotel, Killenard, Co Laois, to be opened by newly elected IFA president Joe Healy.

President Joe Healy said: “At a time when milk is selling below the cost of production, and farmers’ incomes are under huge pressure, this conference aims to focus the dairy industry on developing more tools farmers can utilise to help them manage the periods of low returns which come with price volatility."

All co-op board members, management teams, stakeholder decision makers and farmers are invited to join the exceptional line-up of high calibre speakers at next Wednesday's event.

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Burden on farmers

O’Leary said that the sector is reliant on letting farmers take too much of the market risk, and that more effort is needed to develop means of alleviating the burden on farmers. In the short term, he said, this needs to be by way of milk price support, and sharing of margins.

“For the longer term, we need an industry’s development strategy that includes a suite of tools allowing farmers to smooth out their incomes over peaks and troughs. While part of this tool kit must include flexible finance from banks and responsive farm taxation from government, we will be focusing during the conference on what our industry must do to help farmers cope," he said.

IFA has come together with FCStone to provide a better understanding of the drivers of volatility, and the types of instruments that already exist elsewhere to help farmers cope with it. The conference will hear from Joe and Diane Thome, who farm Redtail Ridge Dairy in Malone, Wisconsin, who will talk about how they developed their farm from 70 to 1300 cows over 20 years, thanks to a variety of hedging, margin insurance and other risk management tools.

Finally, a round table discussion with full audience participation will aim to encourage the Irish dairy industry to develop a model for risk management tools suited to Irish dairy farmers’ needs.

All interested can book one of the limited places for €50 including lunch at www.ifa.ie/dairy.