Profit driven Irish farming model devastating biodiversity, committee told

A farmer based in the heartland of the Irish dairy industry has described the devastating impact that current agricultural practices and policies are having on biodiversity and the environment.

Donal Sheehan, who milks 72 cows daily in Castlelyons in the Bride Valley, Co Cork, told the Oireachtas climate change and environment committee that farming has been driven in an “unsustainable” direction by the Food Harvest 2020 and Foodwise 2025 Government strategies.

Mr Sheehan said the current model is totally production focused with no incentives to look after biodiversity or anything that helps the ecosystem.

“Farmers are sent the signal to produce more and more to fuel the relentless drive for a commodity product that can be sourced cheaply,” he said, adding that “the more you produce the more money you make”.

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“Inevitably, more and more fertiliser is used, more sprays are used on any plant that is competition to the crop, wetlands are drained, hedgerows are removed, woodland and forestry converted to grassland.

“It is all done legally. Habitats have very little protection especially in intensive farming areas where most of the food is produced. There has been a continuous push on farmers to produce more and more for less and less with a devastating impact on the environment.”

Shortcomings

Mr Sheehan is involved in the Bride Project, which has been exploring sustainable methods of dairy farming. He was one of a number of contributors who spoke about the need to provide incentives to farmers to protect habitats on their land and to criticise shortcomings in the current EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and also in its successor, which is due to commence in 2023.

He said farmers should be paid for “managing the farmland habitats in a way that improves biodiversity, water quality and carbon sequestration” as well as for producing food.

The present model of farmers getting a payment from agri-environment schemes for a five year term is not working, Mr Sheehan said, as habitats created using taxpayers’ money through the schemes can be put back into food production when the scheme concludes.

“There is a need to give farmers a continuous signal that there is an indefinite financial value in maintaining and managing these vital habitats from generation to generation,” he added.

Dr James Moran, an expert on eco-agriculture based at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, described the deterioration of habitats, water quality and biodiversity in recent years.

He and Dr Brendan Dunford, manager of the Burren Programme, told the committee that the programme has used a 10-point scoring system in terms of paying farmers and incentivising them to conserve their lands.

He said such pilot schemes could be expanded using modern technology such as mobile phone apps for mapping and operating schemes.

Problematic

He suggested that there was great potential in the new CAP, for the period 2023 to 2027, but warned that the environmental funding available at €10,000 per farm would be “very problematic as many of the farms delivering the highest environment performance under the current CAP are receiving much higher agri-environment supports currently”.

“An important aspect of the payment structures of locally adapted results-based programmes to date (such as the Burren Programme) is that there is no maximum payment ceiling, and that overall budget management is facilitated by degressive payment bands,” Dr Moran said.

“ This is of critical importance to ensure that farmers are enabled to continue to improve their environmental outcomes. This is a key feature of results based agri-environment programmes to date.”

Dr Dunford said the Burren Programme came about when much of the region was designated as special areas of conservation in the late 1990s, which led to frustration among local farmers who felt they could no longer work their land.

Opportunities

“The first, small step to resolving this dilemma was taken by local farm leaders who felt that, with these new environmental challenges, there also had to be opportunities,” he said, adding that ‘better to light a candle than curse the dark’ had become their view.

He described how, over time, the programme was expanded to cover more than 23,000 hectares.

“Farming is a business, but in most cases the farmer is only paid for one of the ecosystem services generated – food – often at the expense of others such as biodiversity, water quality and carbon for which there is a demand, but not a market,” he said.

“In the Burren we addressed this by developing a simple scorecard to capture these services at field level on a scale of 1-10 and linking these scores to payments. Farmers quickly responded, sometimes very innovatively, to this clear incentive, and were also able to avail of additional capital funding to address particular challenges on their farms – protecting vulnerable springs, removing invasive scrub – further improving their fields,” he said.