Suckler & finishing
Suckler income down €5,000
while the kill keeps falling.
Teagasc has suckler income at €19,000 and finishers at breakeven — in a year when the bullock kill is down 7% and EU output is forecast to fall. Read those two numbers beside each other.
Teagasc’s mid-year outlook has average suckler income falling to around €19,000 for 2026, down from just over €24,000 in 2025. Weanling prices are forecast down 10% year on year. Overheads are up 5%. That is roughly €5,000 gone off the average suckler farm in twelve months.
The finishing side is worse again. Cattle finisher income is forecast at about €21,000 against €32,798 last year — down 36%, or €11,000 — with net margins described as sitting at breakeven point.
Now read the supply figures beside it
- Bullock kill down 7% in the first half of the year.
- Carcase weights up 5% over the same period.
- EU beef output forecast to fall 2.6% across the year.
- Weekly kill running under 24,000 head, with the cumulative kill down 9.5%.
- And the finished cattle price forecast 8% lower across 2026, having already fallen 2% so far this year.
Fewer cattle. And a lower price. In any other trade that would be the headline on its own.
What that combination actually tells you
Supply is tightening on both sides — at home and across the EU — and the forecast for what the producer gets is still down. Scarcity that does not lift the price paid to the man who owns the animal is not a market-signal problem. It is a bargaining problem.
Prices in this trade are set one phone call at a time. The seller holds a view of one farm. The buyer holds a view of every farm. Tight supply only becomes leverage if the people holding the supply can see what it is worth — and right now most of them cannot, because nobody tells them what the neighbour was paid.
The one thing still in your own hands
You cannot move the Teagasc forecast and you cannot move the EU output figure. What you can do, before you pick up the phone, is find out what cattle like yours actually made this week. Not the quote. The paid price.
That costs nothing, and it is the only part of this whole picture the individual farmer controls.
Know what your cattle made? Put it on the record.
This site exists so the price a farmer gets is out in the open — reported by farmers, where everyone can see it. The more farmers report, the harder the real trade is to hide.
Report your price Real farm-gate prices, reported by farmers.