Ulster Farmers' Union President talks to UTV about all things farming in Northern Ireland

The Ulster Farmers' Union President David Brown has spoken about the challenges facing the farming community in Northern Ireland.

Mr Brown sat down for a chat with UTV's Paul Reilly and Sarah Clarke at the Balmoral Show.

He explained: "The single biggest issue we've had in the last 12 months has been the war in Ukraine, the bread basket of Europe which again immediately affected supply chains and led to huge cost increases.

"We had inflationary pressures at agricultural inputs on fertilisers, for example, that increased by about 250% last year.

"Feed that went up by about 50-60% and fuel and more recently, finance and the doubling of interest rates impacts on farmers and those who have borrowing and loans and hire/purchase and so forth."

Asked if there were any sectors of farming that were benefitting from high food prices, the UFU President said: "Those price increases did come in the latter part of 2022, but fundamentally never at any point in time outweighed the increases that had existed on input prices so while they may have been getting more for what they produced, the input costs were outweighing that.

"Even into the beginning of this year, if we take the dairy sector for example, where milk prices have increased to close to 50p per litre and are now closer to 30p, so they are on a very sharp trajectory downward and I guess those pressures are coming back from the supermarket to processors and to producers that ultimately, in order to I suppose give the consumer a lower price, that those pressures are very real at farm level."

On the issue of climate change, Mr Brown said: "Farmers recognise the significant change that is taking place in terms of the extremes of weather, so in terms of both the agricultural industry and the wider processing, folks have come together to work towards a sustainability body and obviously carbon and emissions is very much front and centre of that conversation and farmers are very engaged, and myself as president of the Farmers Union, are very engaged in those discussions with industry."

Watch UTV Life at the Show with Paul and Sarah tonight at 8pm on UTV, or catch up on www.itv.com/utvprogrammes. 

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