Tyrella farmer urging Stormont to enact bill for struggling industry

Tyrella farmer urging Stormont to enact bill for struggling industry

5 March 2025

A TYRELLA farmer is urging Stormont politicians to implement a new farm welfare bill, warning that the existence of family farms is under threat if it isn’t.

Ronnie Murphy is a member of Farmers’ For Action (FFA) which is optimistic that the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee will decide very shortly whether to take the Northern Ireland Bill by commencing the process of enactment.

Mr Murphy, who is a member of the FAA’s steering committee, said if enacted, the Bill would be a “game changer for Northern Ireland”.”

He said it would return NI farmers a minimum of the true cost of production plus a margin for inflation linked for produce across the board.

Mr Murphy said this includes milk which farmers currently receive around 44p per litre when it should be almost 60p per litre.

Turning to beef, he said farmers are currently paid around £5.90 per kilo when it should be almost £8.50, explaining it’s a similar story with most other food staples produced by farmers which need an increase of almost 50% “to allow them to pay their bills and have a future for their families”.

Mr Murphy said the NI Bill started life in 2013, with a lot of work invested in it from quite a number of farm organisations that came into support NI Farm Groups with the venture, paying tribute to the late Jim Carmichael, Development Officer at Northern Ireland Agricultural Producers Association, all the way in its journey up until 2021.  

“The development of the Bill evolved to being good to go by 2016, then Stormont fell between 2016 and 2020 during which the climate change debate erupted across governments and the press across the world,” he said.

“During this time, the Bill was modified to take care of unnecessary imports of beef and lamb etc to Northern Ireland, food that we had a surplus of and by 2020 Stormont returned and the Bill went forward to the Agriculture Committee for scrutiny which prompted a series of legal questions, all of which were answered just before Covid erupted.”

Following the global pandemic, there were local elections in Northern Ireland and eventually the NI Executive was restored which resulted in further scrutiny from a newly-appointed Agriculture Committee chaired up by Tom Elliott MLA.

This process has now been completed with the FFA and farmers eager for the Bill to be passed into law.

“Stormont must take the enactment of this Bill very seriously indeed,” declared Mr Murphy.

“The world’s problems keep mounting daily, from climate change affecting Northern Ireland’s farmers and indeed farmers across the world to the increasing Russian threat and ever decreasing value of farm support.

“There is also the inheritance tax hammer blow imposed by the new Labour government on farmers and all these issues are putting the very existence of family farmers on the line.”

Mr Murphy said farmers have been increasingly financially squeezed for decades by corporate food retailers, wholesalers and food processors to a point where recent inflation has been the final nail in the coffin, causing many to exit farming, never to return.

“Many more farmers are in so much debt that current farm incomes will never allow them to survive as they stand, without the intervention of the NI Farm Welfare Bill.”