Minister urged to introduce milk quota for farm managers

The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, has been urged to honour a commitment he gave some years ago to introduce a …

The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, has been urged to honour a commitment he gave some years ago to introduce a pilot scheme for young farm mangers. This would allow them to produce their own milk on farms where they are employed.

Mr Matt O'Keeffe, chairman of the Farm Apprenticeship Board, reminded Mr Walsh of his commitment made at the board's annual conference in Cork in November 2001.

The need to encourage well-trained and highly committed managers to enter and stay in farming would be significantly advanced by this milk quota, Mr O'Keeffe said.

The encouragement of father-son partnerships by the allocation of an extra milk quota should be matched by a similar commitment to farm managers and the pilot scheme should be introduced this month.

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"The ability of an Irish farm manager to establish a milk quota and start building a career as a farmer in his/her own right would be as innovative a development as the share-farming arrangements which have served the New Zealand dairy industry so well," he said. Mr Walsh has frequently highlighted the need to bring young people into farming and at one stage criticised the farm organisations for "talking down" farming as a career.

Meanwhile, the secretary of the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society's dairy committee, Mr George Kearns, said provisional figures for the milk quota year-end indicated an over quota position of more than five million gallons. He said the major cutbacks demanded by each milk purchaser did not materialise and that almost all co-operatives are over quota. The rate of superlevy is 36.68 cent a litre (€1.67 a gallon), he said.

Ireland is allowed to produce just over 1.2 billion gallons annually but individual farmers are fined by the EU if they exceed the amount produced in the milk production year.