The Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) CEO Sean Coughlan has confirmed that the economic values of the Euro-Star indices will be updated in the summer, later this year.

Speaking to Agriland on the AgriFocus podcast this week, Coughlan confirmed that the agreement was reached at the ICBF stakeholder forum.

Coughlan said: "The change to the economic model that happened back in November of 2023 is still having some repercussions, there's no doubt.

"At that point and time, it was clear in the post-Covid era that costs had risen significantly. Beef prices had increased but maybe not at the same pace so that has definitely created a lot of frustration out there.

"I think one of the things that has come out of the stakeholder forum is we agreed we would not wait as long again to actually update the economic values, and we have committed to updating those economic values again this summer".

He confirmed that work is already underway on updating the economic values and is being led by Teagasc's beef enterprise leader Dr. Paul Crosson.

The ICBF CEO said: "I think one of the areas that will obviously get a reasonable jump is going to be beef price for example, because that has risen significantly and I think the outlook for beef price is a lot more positive."

Speaking on the podcast ahead of the ICBF stakeholder forum meeting scheduled for later today (Friday, February 14), Coughlan also confirmed that farmer recorded data will be used as part of the evaluations from this summer onwards.

Weights recorded by farmers for the Suckler Carbon Efficiency Programme (SCEP) are not currently used in the evaluations but weights recorded by technicians are used. The Stakeholder Forum has agreed that all weights will be used from this summer onwards.

Coughlan also said that updates in relation to foreign data on calving difficulty will be included from this summer onwards and a weanling price trait will also be added "to give further credit to weanling producers", according to the ICBF CEO.

Click here to listen to the full interview with ICBF CEO Sean Coughlan.