Editorial: invest now in farming rather than future fines

Two years ago the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) published a report suggesting more needs to be done quicker for Ireland to reach legally binding climate targets. The CCAC was out again this week reinforced by Seamus Coffey’s Fiscal Advisory Council suggesting not much has changed.

However, the negative signalling continues at farmers and for the last two weeks, the midlands and western farmers on peatlands are at the coalface.

So why not change the dialogue on this and use the cue from Marie Donnelly and Seamus Coffey to mobilise farmer climate action at the right price? See page 4. If a farmer is reducing emissions by 25%, then on average that’s a 2t/ha reduction for a dairy farm and a 1t CO2 equivalent per hectare reduction for a beef farmer. At €50/t, you’re talking about €50 to €100/ha. The problem is the voluntary market has a low price, less than €10/ha at the moment. Why not invest money in agriculture and land use now, instead of paying fines in years to come?

I was in Dublin Castle this week for the second EU carbon farming summit and fundamentally I believe there remains a big disconnect between what some legislators or policymakers want for farming and what farmers feel they can or want to do. There also seems to be little or no drive for Ireland to bring something to the market. My sources suggest a high level draft carbon farming plan was almost ready for publication, but is on ice.

The whole business model around carbon farming as an entity on its own seems to be struggling. If €8/ha is all that carbon can be valued at from the voluntary market, then we may forget about it – betting on beef or sheep would be better fun than that. While carbon is one part of the jigsaw, a lot of the co-benefits like improved nature, biodiversity, etc, don’t seem to be getting a look in.

As Northern Ireland farmer Patrick Casement outlined about the ARCZero project again this week, a farm business is so much more than just a herd of cows, a flock of sheep or a cereal crop. It can be an energy generator, it can be a wetland, a forest, it can filter water, filter nutrients and it can drive crop mix change from year to year. However, currently farm businesses are split into separate pillars – ‘food and farm’, ‘energy’, etc. Only the greenhouse gas emissions from the ‘food and farm’ pillar are recognised. Any of the positive changes possible from any of the other pillars are not recognised, or at least are isolated away from the ‘food and farm’ pillar.

Some of the business entrepreneurs speaking at the carbon summit talked about mobilising private funds with new and improved actions that governments can do. Livelihoods Funds CEO Eric Soubeiran gave the example that tax incentive schemes allow you depreciate the purchase cost of a tractor. However, if a farmer makes a nature-based investment, it remains a cost – there is no opportunity to use the nature-based investments as a tax avoidance measure or tax incentive. He said why not incentivise soil improvement the same way and make it tax efficient – it’s what we want and it’s strategic. The European Commission boss in this space Christian Holzleitner (head of unit responsible for land economy and carbon removals at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action) was in Dublin on Tuesday for the summit and while he recently made some progress by getting the carbon removals and carbon farming regulation published, he recognised this is only one part of the jigsaw. He did say EU certification would be ready for the end of 2025, and there seems to be more recognition that farming can never be net zero. However, as he said, we need credible monitoring, good services on the ground, to help project developments and, crucially, finance to make projects bankable.

The negative dialogue is why there were farmers on the streets Tuesday. It’s why there will be another big industry row with farmers now over rewetting and GAEC 2 in CAP in Athlone on Thursday. We do need to protect carbon in soils and grow the volume of carbon that we protect. The destocking journey the industry has been on continues (see stock number decline p64).