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Beef prices paid to Irish farmers have dropped by almost 10% for prime steer and heifer beef over the past month, with cows and young bull prices even more severely cut.
Add in the disruption to the live trade and the closure of our livestock marts for a period and it makes it difficult to assess what the factory price cuts are doing to the live trade. While some marts have embraced technology and moved sales to an online sales platform, others have moved to a tender-based system for processing the sale of cattle.
Families are cooking at home and retailers are seeing a surge in the sale of groceries across stores. However, the sale of steaks and prime cuts appears to be lagging the surge in the sale of poultry and cheaper beef offerings. The food service and retail sector across Europe has drastically declined.
Schemes
All the above implies that beef farming operations are significantly impacted by the current coronavirus crisis and therefore eligible for support under the Government's temporary wage subsidy scheme, where the Government is committing to paying 70% of employees’ wages for a 12-week period.
The catch here, however, is that not many beef farm businesses in the country have employees or pay themselves through the payroll and are therefore ineligible for the scheme.
Farmers could then revert to the pandemic unemployment payment, available to the self-employed, if trading income has collapsed to the extent that you are available to take up other full-time employment if it was offered.
The catch is that there will still be animals to be cared for, fertiliser to be spread, fences maintained and general farm work, leaving a farmer unavailable for other employment.
So, while the Government has provided supports for businesses and employees, and rightly so, there is a distinct lack of direct support forthcoming from the Department of Agriculture and the European Commission.
Loans
Low-cost loans, available through the SBCI in the form of the working capital loan scheme is not available to the primary producer and the Future Growth Loan Scheme requires a minimum investment of €50,000. Not an attractive proposition.
What’s needed is certainty for Irish beef producers. The live export trade to Turkey and Algeria is welcome and we must ensure that our live exports are not sacrificed in any new programme for Government.
Rescue package
The EU's €500bn rescue package lacks detail regarding what is available to the agriculture sector. Future CAP budget talks appear on hold. Our own Government formation talks are ongoing and discussions between Ireland and the EU Commission are in progress.
BEAM funding, a halt to falling beef prices by processors, increased share of the retailers margin to the primary producer, increased marketing campaigns across Britain and Europe by Bord Bia and a commitment from the EU for direct support is the sort of short term certainty urgently required by Irish cattle farmers.
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