Moving to a system of calculating stocking density based on 365 days would involve establishing the tag numbers of all animals on holdings at any time throughout the year, looking at their ages and, in the case of females under two years, checking whether they had calved, establishing the number of days they were on the holding and attributing a livestock unit value of one to animals over two years or cows present on holdings for a full year or a proportionate part of a livestock unit for other cattle aged over six months. This exercise would involve a considerable amount of processing time for the 110,000 farmers who participate in the scheme and could give rise to payments being delayed with consequent irritation to farmers. As a result, my Department considered it prudent to retain the five census dates system with the improvement of using the database to establish the numbers of bovine animals to be taken into account.
I am conscious, however, of the possibility of census dates affecting the market and with the new flexibility allowed by the CMMS database, the census dates will vary to a greater extent than in the past. This will make it more difficult to anticipate them. EU regulations provide that census dates cannot be announced until at least two weeks after they have passed. The timing of notification of census dates can also be used to make it more difficult to predict when they occur.