Increased cattle prices and high rates of disease mean that DAERA officials expect the final bill for bovine TB in NI in the current financial year to April 2026 to end up over £65m.

Addressing the Stormont Agriculture committee last Thursday, DAERA Finance Director Roger Downey confirmed that projections suggest an extra £4.3m will be required in the current year to compensate farmers for reactors taken off farms.

That would take the total paid out for TB cattle to £47.4m, compared to £43.1m in the last financial year. Back in 2019-2020, this equivalent figure stood at £19.5m.

Once other costs are added in, to include testing by private vets, it takes the total bill for TB to a new record high of over £65m.

To help pay for that, DAERA has bid for an extra £3.2m from the Stormont Executive in the first monitoring round of the current financial year.

“Because it’s a statutory obligation and the Executive has funded TB compensation in the past, there is more of a likelihood we would get a bid met for TB compensation than anything else,” Downey told MLAs.

Data

The Department has been slow to publish 2025 data on reactor numbers in NI, however, across the first two months of the year, there were 3,323 reactors, up 6% on the same period in 2024 and 10% ahead of the equivalent figure from 2023.