CAP & the farm gate

Coupled payments are coming back.
Here's how to do them right.

A model that pays for quality, protects the small family farm, rewards grass finishing — and gives the drystock man a fair deal too.

By Brendan Kennedy  ·  Working farmer, Co. Tipperary

There are around 55,000 suckler herds in Ireland. Over 44,000 of them run 25 cows or fewer. The average herd is 16 to 20 cows. And herds with more than 200 cows? Fifty-seven. In the whole country.

Hold that in your head, because it changes everything about how the next round of support should be built. When you hear that a coupled payment would "just reward the big lads," the honest answer is that in suckling, the big lads barely exist. The suckler herd is the small family farm. Any scheme worth the paper should be built around that fact — not against it.

What a coupled payment actually is

Coupled support means the money is tied to what you produce. You get paid per head of animal you actually keep. That's the opposite of the decoupled system we've had since 2005, where the payment is attached to land and entitlements and lands in your account whether you keep a hundred cows or none at all.

"Coupled payments making a comeback" means going back to paying per suckler cow, or per ewe — you only draw it if you're genuinely keeping the animals. Under EU rules a member state can put up to a quarter of its funding into coupled support if it chooses to.

Why it's back on the table

The suckler herd has fallen from about 1.1 million cows in 2013 to under 800,000 now, dropping around 5% a year. The processors and several farm bodies argue coupled payments are the only tool that keeps cows on the ground, because the money follows the animal instead of the land.

The timing matters more than most people realise. Ireland holds the Presidency of the EU Council for the second half of 2026 — which means we are in the chair for the negotiations on the post-2027 CAP. This is the moment the shape of the next scheme gets decided.

The problem with just paying per cow

Here's the trap. If we simply go back to a flat rate per cow like the old days, we repeat the mistake. On the average suckler farm, direct payments already come to roughly 156% of farm income. Read that twice. The farming itself lost money, and the payment more than covered the loss. A flat coupled payment in that setting just pays people to keep cattle that don't wash their face.

The design has to do two jobs at once: keep cows on the small family farm, and drive up the quality of what we produce.

The breeder — paid per suckler cow

Call the base payment x per cow. But x is never flat. It's tied to the star rating and the full breeding scorecard: genetic merit, calving interval, gestation length, docility, carcase quality, and how fast the calf grows on. Keep good stock and the money follows quality, not just headage. Then front-load it to the genuine family farm:

That double rate on the first 25 reaches nearly every suckler farm in the country — because over 44,000 of the 55,000 herds are at 25 cows or under. And the cap at 100 costs the exchequer almost nothing, because so few herds are that big, while it stops the money pouring into the handful of large units that already push enough numbers to negotiate their own price. A farmer with 20 five-star cows should earn more per head than a 300-cow operation running poor genetics for the cheque.

The drystock man — paid per animal killed

The fella buying weanlings and stores and finishing them has no breeding cows, so a per-cow payment never reaches him. He can't be left out — he's half the beef chain. He gets his own coupled payment, paid per animal slaughtered, and tied to the things that actually matter:

• Age at slaughter — the younger the kill, the higher the rate. Younger cattle mean better beef and lower emissions per kilo.
• Grade and spec — hitting the conformation and fat targets the market pays for.
• Quality of the stock finished — rewarding the man who buys well-bred cattle and does right by them.

Front-load his first head and cap the top the same way, so it backs the working finisher rather than the biggest feedlots. And there's a neat link: an animal's ability to finish young and to spec is mostly baked in by the breeder. So the two payments pull the same way — the suckler man who breeds fast, early-maturing stock makes the finisher's young-kill bonus achievable.

A grass-finished bonus — with residency that means something

Here's the piece missing from the whole conversation. Bord Bia already defines grass-fed beef — 90% grass in the diet over the animal's lifetime, and an average of 220 days a year at grass. But there's no grass-finished bonus paid at the factory gate for it. It's a marketing standard and a PGI, not money in the farmer's pocket. That's a gap, and now is the time to close it.

So add a grass-finished bonus on top of everything above — and tie it to real residency. The current in-spec bonus only asks for 70 days on a quality-assured farm and 60 on the last farm. That's short enough that cattle can be bought in and finished fast and still qualify. A grass-finished bonus should demand a minimum residency of six to nine months on the finishing farm, at grass — which lines up with Bord Bia's own 220-days-at-grass definition, so it's not a number plucked from the air.

Be honest about what residency does, though. A long grass residency doesn't shut out every large unit — a genuine grass-finisher who grazes cattle for eight months would qualify, and arguably should. What it shuts out is the buy-and-finish-fast operator who never really grazes the animal. The two things that keep this pointed at the family farm are the long residency and the herd-size cap, working together. Grass on its own isn't the wall.

Qualify on quality, not paperwork

No payment — breeder or finisher — without a clean Bord Bia Quality Assurance audit and real engagement with your Teagasc or approved advisor. That ties the money to well-run, improving farms and keeps it out of the hands of box-tickers. It also lifts the whole national standard, which is exactly what protects the grass-fed brand we all trade on.

The bigger point

Coupled payments, done this way, are the bluntest honest tool we have for saying the money should follow the farming, not the land — and the quality, not just the numbers. But be clear-eyed: even the best-designed coupled payment treats the symptom — fewer cows — while the disease is the price. When the payment is 156% of your income, farming harder often just means losing more. Support can keep cows on the ground; it can't make the farming pay. Only a fair farm-gate price does that.

That's why we built IrelandCattlePrice.com. Farmers lose because they negotiate blind and alone against an operation that sees the whole board. Pool the prices, and you strip away the factory's biggest advantage. Fix the support, yes — but fix the price, and you fix the farm.