Donegal beef producers are looking for farm-quality assurance status from the British Livestock and Meat Commission (LMC) so they can receive better payments for their cattle, if those cattle are slaughtered in factories in Northern Ireland.

This would mean that the Irish beef would be marketed in Britain under the British Farm Standard's Little Red Tractor logo.

Up to 80 of the 150 farmers who are members of the Donegal Beef Producers' Group are seeking accreditation under the farm-quality scheme and representatives of the commission have been to Donegal to meet them.

Bord Bia has its own quality assurance scheme for cattle slaughtered in the Republic; however, if cattle from the Republic are slaughtered in Northern Ireland, they currently cannot be sold as farm-quality assured. As a consequence, prices are lower than those offered for Northern Ireland farm-quality assured animals.

"It's only to create competition; that is all we're doing this for," Mr Austin Stevenson, the Donegal group co-ordinator, explained yesterday. "What we want to do is maximise the price for farm-quality assured beef. If a farmer isn't farm-quality assured, he's taking something like 3p sterling a pound less." On an average finished animal this would amount to around £25 sterling (€40.6), a sizeable additional profit at present day prices.

Mr Stevenson said the group was not talking about sending large quantities of cattle across the border. They were not suggesting that other farmers in the Republic should do the same.

Prices in the local factory were holding at present, but he said: "It just leaves us another avenue. We are out on a limb in Donegal. We can go to factories in Northern Ireland within a half to one-and-a-half hours whereas it could take much longer in the Republic."