The Minster for Agriculture, Simon Coveney, will launch the new €52m Beef Data and Genomic Programme (BDGP) on Tuesday.

The scheme is a welcome boost for a hard-pressed sector that has suffered severe income cuts in recent years with the abolition of REPS, cuts to Disadvantage Area payments, and the abolition Suckler Cow Welfare Scheme (SCWS).

It is aimed at delivering €95 on the first 10 calved cows in a farmer's herd, this drops to €80 for the 11th and subsequent calved cows.

The Minister has delivered on his end of the bargain by putting together the necessary funding for the six year scheme which will run from 2015 - 2020. He will obviously be challenged to provide additional funds should the scheme be oversubscribed. This will no doubt be a favourable headache.

Nevertheless, he must ensure that larger suckler farmers that are depending on the system to make an important contribution to household income are not disadvantaged. Interestingly, some member states actually excluded the first five cows across all farms from similar type schemes. This ensure s support is targeted at those whose income is dependent on agriculture. Perhaps discussion for another day.

Back to the current scheme. There are a number of measures within the new BDGP which will undoubtedly cause concern among farmers, in particular the requirement to ensure that 50% of heifers/cows are ranked 4 and 5 star on the replacement index by 2020. However, I recall major concerns being raised over specific measures contained in the SCWS when it was first introduced. Yet I think most would agree that it turned out to be an excellent scheme.

I have no doubt that the BDGP has the potential to deliver the same level of success and harness the same level of farmer support. However, as was the case when the SCWS was launched, there needs to be the same flexibility shown towards specific measures in order to address unforeseen anomalies that may arise.

For me, one of the big challenges will be around data reliability. There is no doubt that we are right to be incentivising farmers down the route of more functional cows. However, are we right to force them to bring 4 and 5 star heifers with low reliability into the herd at the expense of 3 star heifers which may have higher reliability? Common sense would suggest that 3 star heifers should be included but with a higher reliability score.

Ultimately what we need to do at this stage is ask the question as to what our national suckler herd will look like in six years after the scheme has finished. By that stage, we will have invested over €300m in our national herd. Clearly we need to be able to measure success.

The key areas that we need to set national targets to measure between 2015 and 2020 include: Calves weaned per cow and heifer put to the bull/AI; what is the average weaning weight of calves per cow/heifer put to the bull; the age at first calving; the percentage of heifers retained in the herd for more than three breeding seasons; a herd's average calving interval and; suckler profitability based on standardised input/output values.

ICBF and Teagasc should commit to paper what success will look like across these key areas.