# 5 free CSO datasets every Irish farmer should know — and how AI reads them for you *Published 2026-08-25 by FarmAI Ireland* The CSO publishes five datasets that tell you what is happening to milk, cattle, land and input prices across Ireland. All free, no login, updated monthly or yearly. Most farmers never open them because the tables are built for statisticians. An AI assistant closes that gap: download the CSV, paste it in, and ask your question in plain English. Ten minutes, €0. ## Why bother with State statistics? You already know your own farm's numbers. What the CSO gives you is everyone else's. When a mart price feels low or a milk statement feels light, the question is always the same: is it me, or is it the market? These five datasets answer that. They are the same figures the banks, the co-ops and the Department are looking at. And the licence matters: CSO statistics are free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0). You can pull them, chart them and share them, as long as you name the source. ## The five datasets ### 1. Agricultural Price Indices — what you're paid vs what you pay One monthly release tracks both directions: output prices (milk, cattle, sheep, cereals) and input prices (fertiliser, feed, fuel). The June 2026 release shows why it is worth watching. Output prices were down 15.3% on a year earlier, while input prices rose 7.5%. Milk was down 23.9%, cattle down 12.2%, and fertiliser up 23.6% on June 2025. That squeeze — falling output, rising inputs — is the single most useful early warning in Irish farm data. It lands about six to seven weeks after the month it measures. ### 2. Livestock Slaughterings — the supply behind the price Monthly head counts of cattle, sheep and pigs through the factories, published about four weeks after the month ends. June 2026: 124,400 cattle (down 3.8% on June 2025) and 174,300 sheep (down 12.6%). For January to June, cattle throughput was 809,000 head — down 10.8% on the same period last year. Tight supply is half the story behind any price move. If you sell stock, this is the context the factory already has and you usually don't. We looked at where daily quotes come from in our review of [current cattle price sources](/read/current-cattle-price-sources-tested) — the CSO series is the slower, official benchmark underneath them. ### 3. Milk Statistics — the national tank Monthly domestic milk intake by processors and co-ops, plus butter and skimmed milk powder output. June 2026 intake was 1.05 billion litres, down 35 million litres (3.2%) on June 2025. Second-quarter intake was 3.25 billion litres, down 2.8% on the same quarter last year. If you supply milk, this tells you whether your co-op's story about supply matches the national picture. ### 4. Agricultural Land Prices — what land actually made Not asking prices. Actual sales, from stamp duty records. The 2024 release: a national median of €9,988 per acre across 57,212 acres sold. Arable land made a median of €17,898 per acre; permanent grassland €9,623. Dublin was dearest at €24,125; the West lowest at €7,027 — and the West also sold the most land, at 12,782 acres. It runs well behind — the 2024 figures landed in late 2025 — but for conacre talks, succession planning or a bank meeting, it beats any auctioneer's estimate. ### 5. Crops and Livestock Survey — the national herd, counted The June survey counts every enterprise: cattle, dairy cows, sheep, pigs, and crop areas. Final results for June 2025: 6.9 million cattle, down 278,300 head (3.9%) in a year. Dairy cows down 2.2% to 1.59 million. Sheep down 1.5%. Total cereals up 4.9% to 274,900 hectares, with winter oats area up 140.3%. A shrinking national herd is the backdrop to every beef price conversation for the next three years. This is where that fact comes from. ## How do you get AI to read a CSO table? Every table sits on data.cso.ie under a short code listed on each release's Tables page — monthly milk intake is table AKM01. Each downloads as a CSV, no login, no charge. The series often run back decades. The method: 1. **Find the release** on cso.ie and open its Tables page. Note the table code. 2. **Download the CSV** from data.cso.ie. 3. **Paste it into an AI assistant** — the free tier of any of the big ones handles a CSV fine. 4. **Ask your question in plain English.** Not "analyse this data" — a real question. Prompts that earn their keep: - "Here is CSO monthly milk intake since 2020. How unusual is June 2026 compared with the last five Junes?" - "Chart cattle slaughterings by month for 2024, 2025 and 2026. Where is 2026 diverging?" - "Using this input price index, how much has the cost side moved since I fixed my milk price in January?" The AI does the arithmetic and the comparisons. You supply the judgement about what it means for your yard. The same method works on other public data — we use it on [Met Éireann weather data](/read/met-eireann-weather-data-ai-farmers) too. ## What can go wrong? Three honest caveats. **The lag.** Monthly CSO releases run about four to seven weeks behind. Land prices run months behind. This is benchmark data, not this week's quote — check what the figures cover before you rely on them. **Corrections happen.** The June 2026 milk release was corrected on publication day. The notice on the CSO release page records the intake figure being fixed from 1.05 million litres to 1.05 billion. Always take the number from the live CSO page, not from a screenshot doing the rounds. **AI can misread a table.** CSO CSVs carry index values, units and base years that are easy to muddle. Ask the AI to state the unit and period for every figure it quotes, and spot-check one number against the CSO page. The same rule as always: [check AI's homework](/read/ai-wrong-information-fact-check) before a number reaches a bank or a Department form. ## Where to get help The CSO's own release pages summarise each dataset in plain English — start there before the raw tables. Our [Ireland in Numbers page](/data) tracks the headline farm figures, including CSO commodity prices, and revalidates daily. For what the price jargon means, see [cattle price terms in plain English](/read/cattle-price-terms-plain-english). ## Frequently asked questions **Is CSO data really free to use?** Yes. Statistics on cso.ie are free of charge and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0). You can download, analyse and republish the figures as long as you credit the CSO. The only restriction is on reusing the CSO logo itself. **How current are the figures?** Monthly releases (prices, milk, slaughterings) run about four to seven weeks behind the month they measure. Annual releases run months behind — the 2024 land price figures were published in October 2025. Treat them as a benchmark, not a live quote. **Do I need to know spreadsheets to use this?** No. Download the CSV, paste it into a free AI assistant, and ask questions in plain English. The assistant handles the sorting and sums. Your job is checking one or two figures against the CSO page so you know it read the table right. ## The bottom line Five free datasets tell you what milk, cattle, land and inputs are doing nationally — and an AI assistant turns them from statistician's tables into answers about your own position in about ten minutes. --- ## Sources - [CSO — Agricultural Price Indices June 2026](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-api/agriculturalpriceindicesjune2026/) — Monthly output and input price indices; source of the milk, cattle and fertiliser price movements quoted - [CSO — Milk Statistics June 2026](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-ms/milkstatisticsjune2026/) — Monthly domestic milk intake and dairy product output; source of the June intake figures, the publication-day correction notice, and the Tables page listing PxStat codes such as AKM01 - [CSO — Livestock Slaughterings June 2026](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-ls/livestockslaughteringsjune2026/) — Monthly cattle, sheep and pig slaughterings; source of the head-count figures quoted - [CSO — Agricultural Land Prices 2024](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-alp/agriculturallandprices2024/) — Median land prices by type and region; source of the per-acre figures quoted - [CSO — Crops and Livestock Survey Final Results June 2025](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-clsjf/cropsandlivestocksurveyfinalresultsjune2025/) — National herd and crop area figures; source of the cattle and cereal numbers quoted - [CSO — Copyright Policy](https://www.cso.ie/en/aboutus/whoweare/copyrightpolicy/) — Confirms CSO statistics are free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) --- *Source: [FarmAI Ireland](https://farmai.ie/read/free-cso-datasets-irish-farmers-ai)*