IFA president Joe Healy has said the announcement by Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed imposing compulsory electronic sheep tagging on all sheep from 1 October would cost farmers €2m per year, or €14m over the lifetime of the Food Wise 2025 plan.

Healy said sheep farmers are very angry over the minister’s unilateral decision, as it will increase costs for farmers and cut administration costs for meat plants.

“This move by the minister, on top of his decision on the clean sheep policy and the severe hardship this spring, shows a lack of understanding of how sheep farms work and the pressures farmers are under,” Healy said.

The IFA president said it was disingenuous of Minister Creed to claim that there was consultation on electronic tagging. He rejected this and said the working group that the minister referred to has not met since 2015, which was during the term of his predecessor Simon Coveney.

At that time, the Department of Agriculture said it favoured a system where lambs going directly to the factory from the farm of origin would not need to be electronically tagged.

Minister Creed is now ignoring the Department’s original position and wants to impose EID on all sheep, at an unacceptable cost to farmers.

Farmer engagement

The minister will have to engage with farmers on this issue instead of taking a unilateral approach.

The IFA sheep chair Sean Dennehy said Minister Creed has tried to argue EID is necessary to win some additional market access.

However, he said the real issue holding up market access to the US, Japan and China on sheepmeat is TSE and scrapie, and this is not being addressed by the Department of Agriculture.

He said neither the minister nor the Department of Agriculture can explain how New Zealand enjoys access to all of these markets although it has no tagging or identification system at all for sheep.