It will for me atm any way, we’re just on the edge of heading into higher band and selling good kgs ms
for us here I’ll just focus on the percentages and less on the litres and still try sell the 560 kgs /cow
Bord bia can deem you non compliant as far as I’m aware, if you’re not bord bia approved the coop won’t collect your milk
Ya, based on what you supplied the previous 3 years. If it's over 6300 you are severely punished imo.
Bord bia? Will you give over, if they enforced their 90% grazed grass as part of your cows diet 90% of the herds in the country would be non-conpliant
That's a very grey area and a boogeyman been used to scare lads, when you see the slap on the wrists lads are getting for discharging slurry into waterways leading to fish kills, you logically need to dive into it a bit more, and work out what exactly they can actually do to farms like you mention above that aren't actually polluting our showing up on their radar, re high nitrates in adjoining waterways etc....
that 90% is fresh weight not DM based
Wouldn’t look on it as a punishment …..I do think those bands are a load of ……. Though …if anywhere near 6300 then you’ll be over it pretty quick through maturing stock alone ….drive on into the higher band and to hell with it …..don’t get this stigma some seem to have re keeping less cows ….every herd has cows they could cull …less cows …better quality cows …more milk …more solids …less nitrates pressure .all positive
It is punishment because I'm going over the 250kg. What are the fines like? I believe you can sell entitlements next year with no clawback? I always followed all the rules and now I feel as though I'm getting blaguarded. Maybe time to break the immoral rules as they say. I'm being limited to 2.3 cow/Ha while teagasc are promoting signpost farms as the saviour and they are all stocked at 3+.
From recent Oireachtas debate on banding.....
Bill Callanan DAFM
I will address the issue of banding, which is what the Deputy is getting at. From our perspective, we were operating a single band across all cows. Administratively, that was easy for us. People might not realise it, but the Department performs an administrative check on every single farm for nitrates compliance. The checks are not universal, but we perform checks comparing single farm payments versus farms' animal identification and movement, AIM, data, that is, their livestock, in respect of every farm in the country. It is a large check and quite a number of farmers are non-compliant and suffer a penalty as a consequence.
Moving from a single band will be a challenge, but we are putting our hand up to do that. At European level, most countries were working a banding system and the Commission was adamant that it was a minimum requirement in terms of discussions-----
It was the Commission that made Ireland introduce banding?
Banding is an EU requirement, not something dreamed up by our own government. Fact.
I'm not disputing that fact. If only they set the band @ 7000 litres like the milk recording it would be much fairer is what I was saying. Also I would probably be under it if I was feeding milk to calves and not giving accurate dry off dates on ICBF.
Teagasc were given the job of coming up with the bands and they only made a half arsed effort at the task.... FACT. See if I write fact there it makes it more true apparently 😉.
Had to take the wife out to breakfast this morning to talk her into selling a rental property to buy land.... Bit more work needed to bring her around yet maybe.
I don’t know if it’s as clear-cut as that. From farm reps I’ve spoken to, the EU asked DAFM to “look at banding” but didn’t specify a deadline or what they wanted to see at the end of it.
DAFM then asked Moorepark to consider it and they jumped all over it, producing more figures and details than you could shake a stick at. DAFM ran with it and are now being the best boys in class with the EU.
This might not be the full story either but what’s clear is that DAFM and Moorepark are very enthusiastic for banding, and they’re claiming (as ever) that the big boy made them do it.
Your "best in class" department has us still holding onto the derogation.....by a thread.
Setting the upper band at 7000kg would have resulted in a 118kg N outcome from the calculation for farms in the top category. As the number of farms between 6500 and 7000 is relatively small, the total impact on those farms at the higher level of output would have been more negative if 7000kg cut-off point were used. There will always be a cluster of farms around a certain cut-off point that feel hard done by but if you had say 6 bands then there would be even more famers complaining about being the wrong side of the line. More lines, more marginal cases.
In effect then, whether intended or not (!), the 8000+ litre herds are gaining most by the 6500kg banding as they are not being penalized for their 1500 litres of milk above the threshold. Also, for herds at say 7000, they can drive on now with no additional bands on the horizon to trip them up. The highest output herds have been well treated in this setup.
why sell rented property ,could you not remortage it to come up with the readies .I taught ics used do these sort of loans .Many acres are you after?
I would be slow selling anything but easy enough get back into property later on at any rate but you will rarely seen nice farms coming up
I agree with you. 8, 9k litres herds are getting away light. The band was set too low. And if lads were not feeding so much to calves, if they had compact calving and if they were recording dry off dates accurately there would be alot more over 6300 litres in reality. As I said, it was a very poor effort from teagasc in coming up with the bands. A guy feeding a ton is treated the same as the guys with the diet feeder and feeding 2 ton.
But setting the band around 6500 to minimize the cumulative effect is the whole point. In the methodology used, in any country you like, if you push the band up then the organic N value by definition will go up too. That holds because more milk = more feed= more excretion of N. The same calculation that gives you 106 at 6500 would give you 118kg N at 7000.
Imagine the reaction if the system was published saying herds over 7000 are at 120kg N and over 8000 are 130kg N for example?
I think it would be a much fairer system if it reflected the inputs.
I have a high ebi, compact calving, getting as close to 300 days in milk as possible, automatic calf feeder, recording accurate dry off dates and feeding 1 ton of ration. Good grassland management and maximising grass in the diet. I'm treated the same as the guy feeding 2 ton in an indoor system. If I changed to milking the cows once a day I could milk as many as I like. Makes no sense - FACT. 🙄
You'd wonder why the plug is been pulled here, millions spent on the place, and money wouldn't be a issue, finding staff to run the place was ment to be a issue
If I was you straights I would take the wife out for dinner this evening and tell her your sorry and keep the rental cause the reality is that farming in Ireland could go either way so I wouldn't be making any rash decisions based on banding. It's like when the quotas went everyone was freaking out about trying to stay under but the majority of us went over and paid the superlevy and I didn't see any dairy farmer dying of the hunger
Dry off dates has nothing to do with the banding
it’s going to be calculated on litres sold to coop on coop report divided by av cow numbers for the year
Think about that one for a while
Best of luck with your new project. Have you considered the extra workload, burning time and money travelling back and over to that extra bit of land.
Think you should also have a chat with your accountant before selling rental property, revenue could do well out of it. I think the "wife" would be doing you a favour if she refuses to sell.
Technically is it possible to buy in cull cows in lets say September and finish them over the winter, would this bring up your average number of cows for the year and therefore reduce the average litres per cow keeping some farms under 6500kg?
Distance and workload are a big turn off. Maybe I could keep the maps and let the land. I grew up with an outside block and I know all about the extra work and costs. They are great to take pressure of the milking block though.
The thing is at the moment I have 70 ish cows, although I have facilities for 100. Will have to reduce to 60 and probably 50 in 2024. 50 cows may not be worth 7days a week for me. I must look into the penalties for going over 250kg.
If you don't draw any sfp, don't submit any bps at all, their is no penalties, but the cheque every autumn is hard for lads like yourself to give up
They would still be adding to your kgs of N,
Is it good enough to grow a tillage crop? Minimal time input and a crop in your pit each autumn.
People can forget you can grow a business laterally. While everyone else chases numbers. You could be chasing holding onto more of the gross margin in ways that others couldn't or wouldn't be able to do.
On the bands yes directive comes from Europe but a few groups and one main one determined Ireland’s outcome ….they didn’t seek any widespread input into ways this could be mitigated against ….various different groups and individuals made submissions but they weren’t listened to ….smaller fragmented family farms were treated shabbily as bands as now affect them disproportionally …..if over or near 6300 now you may just cull the ones with enough milk for the tae and drive on as efficiently as u can ,milking less cows and doing more milk per cow just seems to be looked down on for some reason …..a lot of the reason why bar grass and form filling im turning away from Tegasc .advice for me has and is too one dimensional twosrds kiwi dairying
Why the need to milk 600 cows on 265 acres, wouldn't a good 200 cow herd be far easier managed there and the owner would have a good living and room to employ 1 person on a decent salary aswell I'd say.
