What are your thoughts on the fertiliser price s for 2022

Not miles, but he needs to add in electricity, contractor, parts/repairs/maintenance....all taking a serious hike

Yes land type is vital…but it always was before quotas were abolished.

All this talk of milk quotas being reintroduced has me mystified. Firstly, milk quotas can’t be introduced without EU saying so. Secondly, if ‘quota’ is reintroduced, it’ll surely be as an environment protection policy of some sorts…ie, stocking rates or the like. Thus why worry about reference years etc? For argument’s sake, if a stocking rate is introduced, it’ll always be that rate whether you had 5 cows/ha or 2.5 cows/ha. Am I missing something?

I moved because of land/conacre price, and land availability. Reducing cow numbers and increasing tillage is a commercial decision…a decision that I wouldn’t have to do too much consulting with my accountant about…in fact it’s a no-brainer.

On Tuesday sunflowers for next harvest were €600, Wednesday €700 and €805 on Thursday…and I took a nibble on Thursday. I took a plunge on 30% of estimated yield. There isn’t a cow in Europe that could compare with that. And it’s not just in sunflowers, it’s across the board in all commodities. The farmers that are sticking their heels in the ground are either depending on Gov bailouts/supports or are on land that’s not fit for anything else. (IMHO!).

He might not be assuming he has acted fast and bought his fertlizer already. Total fertlizer cost assuming he bought it 7+days ago for 80cows @6k litres is 4.6c/ , last year it was1.9c/ L. However last year was an anomaly with cheapest fertlizer in 6-8 years. With fertlizer at 400/ ton average it would cost him 2.3c/ L.

If he has acted in time extra fertlizer is 2.3c/ L. If he was doing his sums like that I imagine he has already bought it. If he is down your direction and grows 8 acres of barley and whole crops it he is home and hosed.

4c/ L may be optimistic but he be below 6c/L at a guess. That on a 6k L cow. He is not overstocked so he has a great fighting chance

I know what you mean, what Im getting at is maybe smaller lads with little or no debt have the option to get out, whereas as the bigger and heavier borrowed are tied in and its in the coops interest to keep them going...I'm thinking along the lines of NAMA and the developers, bank bailout type thing..thats in the doomsday scenario and I could be talking pure crap.

Unfortunately the main industrial farming lobby groups simply want to double down on the current high input system and ignore the the many elephants in the room in terms of the uncontrollable costs of this approach and how the narrow focus on one particular sector for the last 10 years here has left farming here very exposed to outside shocks. IFJ in particular spinning its usual sh*te on the subject via its current editor.

Government want a stop put to any more increase in Dairy emissions.

From a political point of view, and for public perception reasons, they cannkt have a scenario of a increase in emissions from an increase in numbers.

Even if we put every cow in calf to a beef bull this year, we will still see an increase in dairy numbers in '22, '23, and '24 due to the extra young stock on the ground currently.

All these stock were planned and acted upon before any climate bill or any sectoral targets, so impossible for farmers to have planned any different to the original development plan gov had in place.

But gov need action now, and Minister McG has "set up" (being the operative word) farm orgs and industries to come up with a plan to stop increases. Department' suggestions are

1. Milk Quota..(probably illegal as you say)

2. Cow Quota..referenced in the number of cows you milked in a particular year (suckler payments are based on an average of 3 years which you can pick from

3. Carbon quota.

Yet the Chair of the group (Boyle) maintains any decisions here will be voluntary..

A bit of a **** show will be the result of this forum, me thinks..

So...in light of the above...would you move to reduce cow numbers right now, to offset risks from fert, fuel, feed etc, or hold numbers high.?

I would agree about half. If he bought 6 pallets last October it was probably near 50% of this year's fertlizer@500/ ton or less. That would drag his overall fertlizer costs down by a fraction.

Even if he never sowed barley,.he is in a.gresy position to buy it straight off the combine, whether as whole crop, for crimping or getting it dried.

Justin McCarthy, the IFJ editor, is an outstanding journalist and has served this country and it's farming sector well since he took the job. He was specifically headhunted by Matt Dempsey the previous editor and that itself says a lot. His editorial in Jan1 this year was particularly apt advising against the dangers of compromising food security as energy security had been.

The article in the IFJ on the composition of slurry on the Tullamore farm this week was a very useful piece of journalism, based on facts, and relative to our current predicaments.

On the feed issue it might just be short term. Assume the Russian farms produce their usual crop and Ukraine is back 50%. Grain is not (usually) a perishable product so there will be a 6/12 month window after harvest to disperse. Both countries will be anxious to sell their crops for economic and logistical reasons.

The Russians hopefully will be beaten in 2/3 months - I sincerely hope they are made to pay for the restoration of Ukraine.

What has happened to all these so called food mountains that existed in Europe. I remember a stage when it was ever second week there was some one on the media giving out about over production in Europe and that we had massive wheat, butter and meat mountains. I bet there was some fucker at the back of it trying to make money out of getting rid of them.

I have a bad feeling that the EU has forgotten why CAP was set up originally, and that was for food security. I think they've dropped the ball maybe not as badly as the energy sector, but if it continued for a few more years the whole food supply chain would be gone to a just in time system, which yes is very efficient but no it's not practical and dangerous in the world we live in

Those folk that don’t give 2 shites are ruining it for everyone Mahoney.

Anyhow disregard any comments I’ve made about dairy farmers ducking and diving to prepare for market distortions…Charlie is riding to the rescue like Joe 90.

Robbed from Twitter.

That's the point 2/3 of Ireland is not suitable for corn growing for various reasons.your old enough to remember that it was tillage. beefs. sheep. nearly anything else. .....or go dairy farming pre quota times it was usually the marginal land that was under dairy.

Edit to say I have absolutely no idea How I have quoted all these posts 🤣🤣🙄🙄🙄 ould fellas and technology 😬

Carefull what you wish for - it was those "mountains" that crashed margins across many farming sectors from the late 80's onwards. Also the cost of maintaining those "mountains" was massive and become unaffordable as the EU started expanding to the East. In any case the current issue is with grain supply to North Africa and the Levant rather than to the EU. Its the price rise for animal feed is where the pressure is coming from on the back of the latter and as I said before the quickest way of dealing with that is ending the biofuel scam that has millions of acres of the best tillage land in the EU locked up

What's going to biofuel is not going to change anything in this crisis. End it, don't end it, no real difference.