I recognised the phone number as it came up – the Department of Agricuture in Portlaoise. No matter who I am onto I respond to Portlaoise immediately. They always ring for a specific reason and this time was no different.

They informed me that I was selected by the EU Commission in Brussels as one of the five farms in Ireland to be audited. There was no point in going into the whys and wherefores, I simply wanted to know what had I to do and what were the possible consequences.

In fact, as the Department representive took me slowly and patiently through the process, it was not so much me that was being audited but the Department itself.

The European Commission was sending over personnel to check that the payments the Department was claiming to have made to me actually ended up in my bank account. I was asked to produce my bank statements as proof of having received the money, so I dropped them into the Department offices in Portlaoise.

So we await the next step, if any. This audit was about the 2023 payments which was the first year of the various range of payments under the new CAP which must have imposed a significant extra workload on the Department, but that’s not my area of responsibility.

2024 payment

Meanwhile, I had gone into the Department stand at the Ploughing to see if everything was in order for the 2024 payment and I was told everything was fine and that I could expect the first payment on schedule from mid October on.

None of this to-ing and fro-ing could be classed as productive farming, but it is still critical to the bottom line at the end of the year.

Last week, we sold the 2023 cattle purchases to the factory. These were mostly April/May 2022-born calves, so they were just coming up to the critical 30 months of age. From a margin point of view they left much the same as their more productive earlier finished colleagues, but they had effectively almost two full grazing seasons with a short final finishing indoors. It’s no surprise that margin is hugely dependent on weight gain at grass.