Is Mercosur the final blow for suckler farmers?

It was Marian Harkin who perhaps hit the nail on the head. A poor Mercosur deal, she said, would mean an Irish cow cull in one swoop. I think she’s right.

The suckler herd is hanging by a thread, despite record beef prices, and indeed record prices at the top end of the market for pedigree livestock. But the lived experience of the average suckler farmer, with 16 cows, has very little to do with €30,000 heifer calves, never mind hundred-cow dairy herds.

You might as well be comparing Kilmacud Crokes in south Dublin with Kiltubrid in Leitrim. They are both GAA clubs, but while Kilmacud has 4,800 members plucked from a catchment in excess of 100,000 people, the other has 238 people living in its main village of Keshcarrigan. There are over 130 teams wearing Kilmacud’s purple and gold, with the adult teams’ jerseys sponsored by the Beacon Hospital. No offence to Seán Kelly and Sons Plastering, who sponsor Kiltubrid, but I reckon Ireland’s largest private hospital has considerably deeper pockets. It isn’t an even playing pitch.

Futures on the line

It’s small suckler farmers in Kiltubrid, all across Leitrim and right along the west of Ireland whose futures are on the line here. They produce the best beef calves in the country, the ones that will be most affected by 99,000t of prime Brazilian and Argentinian cuts coming into the EU.

These calves are mostly produced in small numbers on dispersed holdings of marginal land. And the farmers are getting older, and in many cases, no one is coming along to take over, in too many cases.

In June 2024, all the issues surrounding the nitrates derogation saw dairy cow numbers contract by 22,000 compared to 12 months earlier. However, suckler cow numbers fell by twice as much, from a lower base, with no derogation effect and positive markets.

It feels like a large proportion of suckler farmers are part-time enthusiasts hanging on by their fingernails. The economics of a Mercosur deal are one thing, the optics of it are potentially even more serious.

Whatever hope small-scale suckler farmers have of better days ahead could be extinguished. No matter what Ursula von der Leyen says, it will be seen as a sellout by Brussels of Irish farmers. And no matter what supports Micheál Martin, Simon Harris and whoever ends up in Government alongside them say, they will be seen as powerless to protect Irish farmers from the dive to the bottom that globalisation looks like to farmers.

Actually, I’m going to slightly amend Marian Harkin’s words. It won’t actually be a suckler cow cull, it’ll be a suckler farmer cull.