By Katie Gleeson
@katieinthecountry
Dairy farmer and DWI Steering Committee Member

We spend a lot of time in Irish dairy farming talking about efficiency.

How efficiently are we growing grass? Using fertiliser? Producing milk? Using each hectare? Where can costs be cut, output improved or another small percentage gained? All of this is for a good reason: dairy farming is a business where margins matter and waste benefits nobody.

But this summer has made me think about something we don’t measure quite so easily: the value of having a buffer.

When grass growth slowed during the dry weather, the things that suddenly felt most valuable weren’t necessarily productive on paper. It was the extra bales silage in the yard. A few extra days of grass ahead of the cows in the rotation. Enough capacity in a water system to cope with increased demand. A second water source. Buffer zones to reduce nutrient runoff to our watercourses.

On a spreadsheet, spare capacity can sometimes look like inefficiency and is highlighted as such. But in reality on a farm during a difficult year, spare capacity is resilience. There is, of course, a balance. Nobody can afford to keep endless reserves of feed, land, money or infrastructure sitting idle just in case. The challenge is deciding how close to the line we can afford to run when the conditions we are farming in are becoming increasingly unpredictable. That is a conversation we need to take seriously.

Our climate is changing, but the challenge for dairy farming is that we don’t know exactly what the next difficult season will look like. Spring of ’24 and ’26 we battled exceptionally wet conditions; this summer drought conditions. There is another reminder of that uncertainty developing thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, El Niño is strengthening. Climate forecasters now put the chance of a very strong event this autumn and winter at over 90%. They note, there is an estimated 69% chance that between October and December it could become stronger than any El Niño event recorded since 1950. Naturally, the first question from our perspective on Irish farms is: Right, so what does that mean for us next spring? The slightly irritating answer is: nobody can tell us precisely.

The next challenge might be too much rain, too little of it, several storms, an input-price shock on global markets or something none of us has thought of yet. We can’t run farm businesses – or co-ops – capable of anticipating every eventuality. But we can leave ourselves with enough choices for when the unexpected arrives. Ultimately, that’s the value of a buffer. It doesn’t stop the shock from coming; it gives us the capacity to absorb it before a short-term shock becomes a long-term problem.