Agriland spoke with the director of Dairy Industry Ireland (DII), Conor Mulvihill at the National Ploughing Championship, on the impact the EU-US trade deal will have on dairy and the slight downward pressures in dairy markets.<\/p>\n
Mulvihill was full of enthusiasm about the really positive year 2025 was for dairy farmers, driven by good milk prices, weather and policy sentiment.<\/p>\n
However, Mulvihill warned that there has been a “slight downward pressure” of already records prices in the last couple of months and is evident from the drop in milk prices from our co-ops for August supplies.<\/p>\n
The director of DII warned that high prices will drive production globally and that better weather across the world is pumping extra supply on the market.<\/p>\n
Mulvihill said: “We export 93% of our milk, so we are based on a global market, so there is a downward pressure there, but nothing fundamental that I can see.”<\/p>\n
Mulvihill reflected on the consensus that the EU-US trade deal is better than what we expected, but said that it is “not welcome at all” and added that “any trade dispute between the two is not welcome”.<\/p>\n
The only consolation was that the 15% was not put on existing tariffs, which leaves Ireland at a lower rate than the UK and New Zealand. <\/p>\n
Mulvihill highlighted that there are a lot of goods going over to US, which buys nearly a billion euro worth of dairy and that Irish dairy going to the US has been “a real success story”.<\/p>\n
“What isn’t said is that we are a huge success story for the US dairy” he noted, adding that Irish milk co-ops are also major customers of the US dairy industry.<\/p>\n
“We support the US dairy farmer and the US economy as well, we find it a balanced relationship.”<\/p>\n
In terms of how the trade deal is working out at the moment, Mulvihill said: “We did a lot of forward selling into the market and we are still working our way out.”<\/p>\n
He stressed that, at the moment, negotiations and trade are going well but the main problem is the collapse of the US dollar by 15%, which he said on top of a 15% tariff is really like a 30% tariff.<\/p>\n
Mulvihill added that US does not produce enough casein and that Ireland sells a lot to them as a result.<\/p>\n
Negotiations are ongoing with the US, European and Irish authorities to “see if we can get zero for zero, win-win tariff on that”.<\/p>\n
Mulvihill said that this move would be “a big help to Irish farmers and farm gate prices.”<\/p>\n
The director of DII also went on to talk about the positive results coming from three consecutive Environmental Protection Agency reports on nitrates levels in our water. <\/p>\n
He also describes the positive work farmers are doing to improve water quality and retain the Nitrates Derogation for 2026. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agriland spoke with the director of Dairy Industry Ireland (DII), Conor Mulvihill at the National Ploughing Championship, on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-34800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}