Budget does little for farmers as costs rise in poor weather

There’s an old saying, ‘Of all the months of the year, curse a fair February’, which means poor weather usually follows a fine February, and that proved true this year, Paddy Donnelly says.

The Westmeath IFA veteran is talking about how Budget 2024 will affect farmers, if it did much for them at all, and Paddy, a suckler beef and sheep farmer based in Slanemore, says: “Off the back of what was a tough year for farmers, there wasn’t much in the budget for the farming community.

“Weather-wise, the first half of the year was very wet, and then you had a month or so of good weather, but it didn’t last.” That led to livestock being five months behind where they should be, and barley still needing to be cut in some parts of the country, while input costs continued to rise, says Paddy.

“Diesel prices went down a little bit but rose again. Livestock is about five weeks behind last year, and the lambs haven’t been doing a great price either, because of the wet weather – prices are way back, possibly by a euro a kilo, on last year.

“Milk prices have come back a considerable amount, prices are nearly back to productions costs. Cattle, heavy cattle, are making good prices, but so too is the replacement of them. All in all, it has been a tough enough year and the budget didn’t seem to have an awful lot in it for farmers, except maybe the sheep farmers, who got a bit extra to bring them up to nearly €20 a ewe.”

Richard O’Brien, Westmeath IFA chairman, agrees, and points out that while the sheep farmers got an €8 payment top-up to take to make the €20 per ewe, that price was short of the €30 they had been seeking.

“Teagasc figures show the gross margin on the sheep farmer is €7 per ewe for the year, so you’d want an awful lot of sheep to make a living. The most important one altogether was the fact that the overall money allocated to agriculture was cut from €2.14 billion, to €1.94 billion. That was a dampener to start with, says the Athlone man, who runs a mixed enterprise – a few sucklers, sheep, and corn and forestry.

Richard highlights some of the positives, including the deferral of the Residential Zoned Land Tax for 12 months, which he believes will give the farming community more “clarity” on what land will be affected, as well as the Land Leasing Income Tax Relief, which will prevent companies buying agricultural land to lease it out to farmers. “Unless you’ve farmed it and owned it for seven years, you won’t get the tax benefits on it,” he explains.

“The suckler cow is getting a bit more, but it’s a bit vague on what way it’s going to be implemented, while on slurry storage, there’s a 70% grant towards increased storage space. A big positive is the €2.5 million allocated to safety, health and wellbeing for farmers. So it might encourage us farmers to look after ourselves a bit better.”