What are your thoughts on the fertiliser price s for 2022

I hope you found a way to make a few pound out of your analysis of world economics, you have been spot on in your predictions over the past year or more when it wasn't always as obvious.

Are we looking at another massive consolidation of farms with the big getting bigger or where are we headed.

My thinking here at the minute will be entirely decided by what milk price glanbia pull out for Feb to April milk if they don't get up to a 45 cent base minus all their gimmicks, its setting of alarm bells they aren't going to pay enough to tackle spiraling inflation on systems where alot of feed and fertilizer is going in, circa 200 milkers here and in all honesty u reckon by 2023 I'll pair it back to 130 and for 24 if the thing hasn't sorted itself out will drop all rented ground go back to 60-70 cows whatever my ground can support in a self contained almost organic like system and get some off-farm income coming in.....

Re larger scale i reckon highly indebted large scale set-ups are most exposed to the market, they can't scale back as a certain output is needed to maintain income for debt repayments/wages etc but if milk prices don't track feed/fert etc inflation they are sunk

Jesus that's fairly serious change, i suppose I'm at what your talking about scaling back to maybe a few less cows, problem I'm finding is there is only so many costs you can cut.

Do you think would there be many thinking like that? I still think there are lads falling over themselves to milk cows in the glanbia area anyway. Young lad near me just started up on small enough land base in relative terms, I hope lads like that don't get destroyed. Wouldn't be as sympathetic to the dairy hero's.

I'd say them figures are exaggerated

You have a inflation price index that takes into account the price of inputs for a base price year and from one year to the next if the cost of production for potatoes/beef/vegetables/milk etc increases our decreases a rebate is given our refund is paid by the farmer, for arguments sake a ton of milling wheat has a base price of 300 euro, the next year inflation rises 10% so the cost to the farmer to produce this ton of wheat is 330 euro, the open market selling price is only 250 euro on commodity markets, in this example the farmer gets a rebate of 80 odd euro per ton to compensate for having to sell at a loss....

Obviously no muti-national supermarket will pay the actual market value of the produce and will then land the tax-payer with a huge bill to cover the difference so its only a pipe-dream

I wonder Will there be any wheat sown or harvested in Ukrainian this year?

In Ukraine they say you can put a "dead" twig in the ground and it will grow, very dark, fertile soil.

The kind of supports your talking about would probably be illegal, in the European free market

It's a tough 1, can governments keep printing money to bail out everybody everywhere when the going gets tough..I think a lot of covid supports and money printing was totally unnecessary and ended up with asset bubbles almost everywhere you look.

I dunno what could be done.

Divert glas bird cover money to an arable crop rather than feed the birds.?

Dairy/suckler cow slaughter premium.?

Tax relief on 2021 income? Lot of big tax bills last year it could be subject to conditions maybe to suit a particular national need.

Pain is the solution to it all. The past twenty years has driven the whole economy out of balance. It's not possible for politicians to rebalance it due to the complexity of it all.

All subsidies and new deficits will do is drive things higher