Mike Magan, Kilashee, Co Longford

DEAR SIR: Well done to all who organised a good riddance, sorry, I mean a goodbye to quotas party. It was fitting to mark the departure of such a long-term guest, particularly when it overstayed its welcome. Quotas may initially have done a necessary job, but were, in my opinion, retained for 20 years too long.

I won’t dwell too much on quotas, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of a few facts, lest we ever dare to consider such a mechanism again. Around €1bn was spent buying and selling quotas to each other since the quotas trading scheme came into being 10 years ago.

I’m not sure how much was spent exchanging quotas between farms prior to that, but I’m sure it was a huge amount. We may never know what impact quotas had on those of the 68,000 farmers in milk production in 1984, who have since ceased production.

Some, I’m sure, would have left the industry anyway, but I’m also sure quotas played a significant part in pushing people out of the industry. All this money was spent on something that was never supposed to acquire value.

Maybe the greatest cost of all was the worry it brought to individual farmers. Worry of exceeding quotas, worry about how to limit output when the potential was there, and the aforementioned worry about the cost of buying a licence to produce.

Enough of the negative, as a veteran of the pre-quotas era, I sense the start of a really exciting time for the dairy industry. Sure, expansion is not for everybody and like in any business, plans to expand and invest need to be analysed in great detail by any individual considering expansion.

Be better first, then bigger, is solid advice. But notwithstanding this, we will get great growth in the industry. How much growth and what pace and range of growth can be greatly helped by central policy and industry imagination.

We have the grass-based system that makes milk production in Ireland better than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.

We have tools like the profit monitor, milk recording, herd health programmes, the EBI and a discussion group network, that make our job easier.

There are some gaps that need to be filled, and some progress has been made in areas like land-use policy and tax incentives, but more can and needs to be done.

How’s this for a new (old) way of thinking? Set up a dairy expansion group in every county. This will be made up of all stakeholders, farm organisations, co-ops, Department of Agriculture and, crucially, county development boards and county councils.

This group would drive dairy development, smooth out legislation and planning issues and, most critically, be owned by all parties. The county set up is to create a local pride and competitive element. A set of KPIs, like the percentage of farmers grass budgeting, using AI, doing profit monitors, milk recording, etc, can be used to do inter-county comparisons and to drive change.

The expansion that occurred in the 1970s was greatly helped by the county structure, so it is worth looking at it again. Each county would have an expert in grass, financial planning and animal health. The current recruitment embargo in Teagasc needs to go.

We don’t need more talking shops. But we do need overall direction which can be provided by a group, such as the 2025 committee giving direction to each county group.