Intensive farmers who are carrying more animals on their land than is allowed under the EU Nitrates Directive face serious difficulties if there is not an improvement in water quality in the next four years, a conference in Tullamore, Co Offaly, heard yesterday.
Mr Sean Regan, chief environmental adviser with Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority, said paying lip service to the directive could lead to severe restrictions on farm production within a few years.
The directive specifies a maximum of 2.5 dairy cows or equivalent animals per hectare, falling to two after four years.
Mr Regan said the directive, from which Ireland sought a derogation and is now in the process of addressing, was obligatory on all member-states and was one of the key EU measures designed to control pollution from agricultrue.
An action programme drawn up by the Government was now at an advanced stage, he told the Teagasc annual rural environment protection scheme conference in Tullamore.
A sensible and coherent national approach was essential in order to ensure that the nitrates directive delivered measurable improvements in water quality within four years.
If this did not happen, 10,000 of the State's most commercial farms would be hit, Mr Regan said.
"Over 100,000 farmers are farming at less than two dairy cows or equivalent per hectare. One-third of these are participating in REPS and are assumed to be in compliance with the directive," he said.
"Compliance for the remainder will involve much the same pollution control facilities and practices that are operated for the rural environment protection scheme."
However, there were more than 3,000 intensive farmers with stock levels over the 2.5-cow limit who would be immediately affected by the nitrates directive.
"However, if implementation does not lead to improvements in water quality, a further 7,000 farmers with more than two dairy cows or equivalent could be affected within four years," he said.
Recent studies by two Teagasc economists had shown that complying with the nitrates directive on intensive farms could reduce the income of these farms by between 10 and 20 per cent.
The conference heard that the majority of funding paid out to farmers to farm in an environmentally sensitive way under the Reps scheme was being paid to farmers in Connacht.
The five western counties received the largest Reps payment of €1.3 million since 1994 and had received a total of €430 million over the period.
According to Mr John Carty of the Department of Agricultue and Food, of the 37,000 farmers who had signed up for the scheme, 4,575 were in Mayo, followed by Co Galway with almost.
However, the highest percentage of farmers taking part in Reps was in Co Leitrim, where three out of every five had joined up.