The price paid for R3 grade steers in Ireland and Britain widened to €1/kg in the week ending 24 October. Irish R3 steers averaged €6.72c/kg excluding VAT, whereas the equivalent animal in Britain was priced at €7.72/kg.
As Figure 1 shows, this is the widest differential since March last year.
In Northern Ireland, the equivalent price paid was €7.42/kg for the R3 steer grade.
While Irish prices have been on an upward trend since August, during September and into October, prices increased faster in Britain.
Increased Irish cattle supplies
Factory throughput was particularly low in the first half of the year, but over recent weeks it has been running ahead of the corresponding week in 2025.
For the week ending 24 October, the factory kill was 36,943 head, the highest so far in 2026, and over 9,000 more than the same week last year.
This contrasts with the position in Britain. There, AHDB reports that while cattle numbers increased by 3% in July and 4% in August, they fell by 5% in September.
Overall, in the third quarter, 3,300 fewer cattle were processed in Britain and for the year to September, numbers were down 1.6%, or 24,000 head, to 1.48 million. Interestingly, while numbers were down, the amount of beef produced remained similar to the year before because of higher carcase weights.
UK buyers get the benefit
With Irish beef seamlessly integrated into the supply chains of major British supermarkets and burger chains, the current price of Irish beef makes it a particularly attractive option for their buyers. The largest three supermarket groups: Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda have over half of the UK grocery market.
They, along with the major burger chains, are significant buyers of Irish beef, and present their beef offering as “British and Irish”, though their promotional activity emphasises their support for British farming across their range.
However, Bord Bia research shows that 85% of shoppers in Britain were open to choosing Irish-sourced food and drink, the highest score for any country outside the UK. Essentially, this makes Irish produce the preferred option when it comes to imports.
Market share
The Irish Farmers Journal understands that there is an expectation that for supermarkets that use Irish beef, at least half of their total beef offering will be UK-sourced. There is no recent data on what percentage is British and what percentage is Irish.
Up until January 2021, AHDB (the levy board in England) undertook a regular survey on what percentage of beef facings were British. In the last survey published for January 2021, 72% of Tesco’s beef offering was British, down from 77% the previous November.
Sainsbury’s, the second-largest retailer, had 92% of its beef offering identified as British beef, up from 82% in November 2020.
Asda has traditionally been one of the strongest buyers of Irish beef and in January 2021, 63% of its offering was British, down from 65% in the previous survey.
With British- and Irish-only beef sourcing policy, we can assume that whatever beef wasn’t British has to have been Irish. Although the survey stopped in January 2021, the indications have been that a similar sourcing policy has been pursued most of the time since then with some fluctuation.
However, in recent weeks, the Irish Farmers Journal has learned that one of these supermarket groups in particular has significantly increased the volume of Irish beef that it has been sourcing to well beyond 50% of its total requirement.
Policy impact
The great fear during Brexit negotiations was that the absence of an EU-UK trade deal would mean Irish beef having to pay a full tariff on entering the UK, making it commercially uncompetitive.
That was avoided by the “no tariff, no quota” deal that was finally agreed, though Irish beef was subject to full sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) controls when the UK left the single market. In practice, that means that every consignment had to be accompanied by a veterinary certificate and was subject to inspections that weren’t necessary when the UK was part of the EU single market.
For large exporters like the main meat and dairy companies, these controls were a bureaucratic nuisance but manageable.
In any case, they could be coming to an end in the foreseeable future. It is now widely reported that the EU and UK have reached agreement on an SPS deal. This has been in negotiations since the middle of last year and is expected to be concluded at a summit to be held later this month.
It won’t be a game changer for major exporters despatching 20-tonne consignments with a single certificate, but it will be of major benefit to exporters with multiple small consignments as each individual shipment requires its own certificate should be volume be 2kg or 20 tonnes.
Part of the explanation for the huge gap between Irish R3 steers and their British counterparts is that prices in Britain are exceptionally high at present. A more accurate measure of Irish factory price performance can be obtained from looking at the price paid in all of Ireland’s main export markets, not just the UK. This is what Bord Bia’s export benchmark price, which is published in the business of farming section of the Irish Farmers Journal, every week.
It compares the prices paid for prime cattle in the six main export markets for Irish beef to create a benchmark price for what Irish farmers would receive if this was applied to the cattle they killed on a weekly basis. This is then compared with the actual price paid in Ireland to see if Irish farmers are getting the same as the benchmark (or above/below it) as shown in Figure 2. The most recent data for week ending 17 October shows the Irish price was 23c/kg below the benchmark average for prime cattle.
The current reality for Irish farmers is that with a relatively high supply of cattle, factories hold the aces in negotiating price, irrespective of what farmers in countries we export to are getting paid.
