IFA president Francie Gorman led a delegation last week to meet the Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon and senior DAFM officials to discuss IFA’s pre-Budget submission.

“The three main pillars of the IFA submission are the retention and expansion of farm schemes, supports to mitigate the inflationary costs of production and retention of the tax reliefs that underpin the sector.

“With reduced margins expected this year, we re-iterated the fundamental importance of ANC and other national schemes. We also reinforced that linear cuts to national schemes, like what happened last year to the sheep and livestock schemes, will not be tolerated by farmers. New applicants need to be budgeted for, not funded from existing scheme participants. Anybody who applies and complies with the terms and conditions should not find themselves out of pocket at a later date,” Gorman said.

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“There was a lot of focus around the Straw Incorporation Measure. It’s positive that all eligible farmers have been accepted into the scheme, but this needs to be matched by additional funding to meet the demand in full. Until that happens, it’s hard for farmers to know whether it’s best to incorporate straw and avail of SIM, or to bale the straw and get prevailing market prices without SIM support – because they can’t do both.

“The need for more medium and long-term supports to preserve and grow the sector was also emphasised,” Gorman added. “It’s imperative now that any surplus or unallocated funds from the Fuel Support scheme are retained within agriculture, with the appropriate balance struck between retaining funds for potentially another round of fuel supports and the immediate or short-term funding around the Fertiliser Support Scheme (where maximum 200% co-financing is required on top of €15.4m secured from Europe) and Nutrient Storage investments within TAMS.”

“Among the other key priorities we emphasised were a permanent RZLT exemption for active farmers; a continuation of key taxation supports and the need to address current discrepancies between the livestock VAT rate and Flat Rate Addition VAT rate which is costing farmers on the sale of livestock.

Upcoming events

Sun, 9 Aug

  • IFA will be at the Tullamore Show.

    • Mon, 10 Aug

  • IFA to meet Tirlán on US butter market.