The President of ICMSA, Denis Drennan, has said that questions and concerns amongst farmers are rapidly growing in relation to the decision of Dovea Genetics, Eurogene, Munster Bovine and Progressive Genetics to simultaneously apply Intellectual Property (IP) rights to a percentage of their bulls in 2025.
Calling these proposals “a potential fundamental intrusion on farmers’ property rights,” the ICMSA President said the AI companies should postpone their decision to allow further discussion on the matter as well as ensuring that an acceptable degree of competition is maintained in the provision of AI services going forward.
Mr Drennan said that this was a very significant change of position on the part of the AI companies and farmers had to be fully aware of the implications for the ownership rights of their animals.
“The introduction of these changes by the AI companies will allow the AI companies to exercise control over the offspring of animals fertilised with these AI companies’ straws. Those are the facts, no-one denies that, and we think that this amounts to a very, very serious change in the full ownership of that offspring that heretofore was the absolute property of the farmer.
“Effectively, the farmer no longer has full ownership of his or her animal where an IP bull is used and ICMSA thinks that there is a clear onus on the AI companies to inform farmers of this new arrangement, the reasons why they believe it is a good idea, and the full implications for the farmer concerned,” said Mr Drennan.
The ICMSA President acknowledged that there had been some communications from the AI companies, but he said it was wholly inadequate and untimely.
“Having articles in agricultural media, sending email correspondence at peak calving and within weeks of the 2025 breeding season is not the optimum way of communicating with your farmer-customers. If the AI companies are convinced that the introduction of this IP is the correct course of action, they should press ‘Pause’ and suspend the introduction of IP for 2025. They should then ensure that farmers are fully informed of their reasoning behind the move, aware of the implications, and that farmers should actually sign up to it going forward – if that is their choice,” said Mr Drennan.
He said it was completely unacceptable to arrive at a situation where a farmer could find in spring 2026 that he or she is not allowed to sell their offspring to another AI company without the permission of the IP bull AI company. Mr Drennan said that there was no point in pretending that this was not a huge change, and farmers were absolutely justified in wondering where this change in practice was going and whether or not this was just the first step in a journey to control Irish cattle breeding by four companies.
“Our superb breeding today is down to the work of the farmers themselves, along with the work of these AI companies. But for the AI companies to effectively take full control of a farmer’s stock offspring is a huge concern that warrants real discussion and ICMSA is calling on the AI companies – three of which are farmer owned – to immediately suspend their proposal and enter a period of discussion with the relevant parties in the industry to chart our future direction together. It is not up to these four companies to take this enormously significant decision for us. The growth year-on-year of sexed semen is going to inevitably lead to our bovine genetic base become smaller, and we need to work together, as opposed to one element of the process taking full control,” concluded Mr Drennan.
