It has taken a long time to become a serious proposal but the recent application by the Irish Government and Minister for Agriculture to apply for special PGI status for Irish grass-fed beef must be warmly welcomed. But it will be a tough task to match the achievements of Kerrygold in gaining huge consumer acceptance with a very significant price premium coming back to milk producers via their co-ops.

The upmarket Whole Foods business in the US was a retail pioneer in this field before it was bought by the gigantic Amazon company

The idea of a premium for “a natural grass-fed product” in beef is not new and, increasingly, medical and nutritional science are coming up with evidence of real health benefits from the omega-3 fatty acid components in grass-fed beef.

The upmarket Whole Foods business in the US was a retail pioneer in this field before it was bought by the gigantic Amazon company. If we succeed in having the designation accepted by the Brussels authorities, it will be interesting to see if the Irish beef industry, with its present structure, will have the capacity and inclination to match the Kerrygold achievements or will the temptation to maximise processor margins be the driving force? The criteria of steers up to 36 months of age, grading at least O-, seems tailor-made for the emerging dairy beef sector which will inevitably grow with increasing dairy cow numbers but that is different from sustainable beef producer profitability.

It seems to me that the Department submission to Brussels for the new beef scheme is specifically tailored to encourage the dairy-beef sector

It would be encouraging to see a concerted analysis by farmers, factories, the Department of Agriculture and Teagasc to develop credible benchmarks to pinpoint a way forward. It seems to me that the Department submission to Brussels for the new beef scheme is specifically tailored to encourage the dairy-beef sector. That is fine but we should recognise that we are attempting to make an intrinsically inefficient form of beef production profitable.

The key question is, will it be enough to compensate for lower weight gain, lower conversion efficiency, poorer kill-out and poorer grading than its suckler counterpart? Incentives will be needed.