About 100 Laois malting barley growers attended a meeting in Portlaoise on Wednesday night which urged Boortmalt to reverse their decision to cut their contract with Stradbally Town and Country.
Stradbally Town and Country has been a grain intake in the town for over 150 years and has been where Laois farmers deliver malting barley, a premium crop that is a central ingredient for Guinness.
About 200 farmers in Laois grow malting barley on contract for Boortmalt – one of the biggest malt producers in the world – but they received notification last week that those contracts will not be renewed for this season and that Stradbally Town and Country would no longer be an intake for malting barley.
As well as being a considerable financial loss to farmers it also provides numerous logistical issues. Malting barley is predominantly sown in the spring and growers would have planned on doing so again this year. Considerable volumes of winter barley is predominantly sown in the autumn and goes to animal feed.
The IFA’s national grain chairman John Murphy told the meeting on Wednesday that Boortmalt had informed him that they will honour growers’ contracts at another intake.
“Every grower will have an opportunity to grow malt,” he is reported as saying in the Farmers Journal. However, with 60% of Stradbally Town and Country suppliers deemed to be small growers with 30 acres or less, a local branch is essential as haulage by lorry is both impractical and expensive. Most growers will deliver by tractor and trailer themselves.
Laois IFA grain chairman Rory Doyle has been quoted as saying, “We’re third generation malting barley growers on our farm and we got no word whatsoever that this was going to happen. It came out of the blue.
“We could have sown a lot more winter crops if we had known.”
“This is a bombshell for Laois,” added Laois IFA chairman Henry Burns. “Malting barley is of huge importance in Laois to add premiums to barley.”
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