Minister was in right place at right time to push organic farming

Outgoing Minister of State Pippa Hackett announced during the week that she expects there will be approximately a further 700 new entrants to the Organic Farming Scheme (OFS).

This will bring the total of Irish organic farmers up to 5,600, with 280,000ha or 5.5% of all farmland being farmed organically and over halfway to the 10% 2030 target.

The outgoing minister can look back with satisfaction on her time in office.

Being an organic farmer herself, she brought personal as well as ministerial enthusiasm to the challenge of growing the organic sector.

Good timing

The minister was in the right place at the right time to push organic farming.

Growth in organics was one of the key planks of the CAP that came into effect in 2023, where the ambition was to move 25% of EU farmland into organic production.

Austria is already there and several mainland European countries have a well-established organic sector, underpinned by large affluent urban markets.

Organic farming has historically been a niche enterprise in Ireland, largely because the ethos of organic production doesn’t sit easily with produce being transported thousands of miles.

With Ireland an export-orientated country, mainstream agriculture took precedence. This business was underpinned by particularly successful dairy and meat processing industries that successfully developed export markets around the world.

EU and Government policy

In the present CAP - and indeed outgoing Government policy - was to focus on environmental protection and drive down emissions from agriculture.

A switch to organic farming fitted perfectly into this strategy and enthusiasm among farmers was nurtured by significant financial support.

This support has meant that organic expansion in Ireland has been production-led as opposed to market-led. The 'build it and they will come' philosophy has meant that output has increased faster than the market capability to absorb more organic produce.

A strategy to grow the market was launched in autumn and it has the ambition to grow the value of the market by threefold.

However, at present, large quantities of produce - particularly sheepmeat and some beef - are being sold in conventional markets without an organic premium. The jury is out on whether markets will follow production in the sector.

A further complication is that customers want supply on a week-to-week basis year-round.

Organic production tends to be more sporadic and seasonal, as it doesn’t have the benefit of fertiliser, feed and pest control that conventional agriculture uses to maximise and regulate timing of output.

Production-led

No doubt there is a healthy future for organic farming in Ireland, so long as it remains a political priority and is supported accordingly with production grants.

However, for long-term success, it would be more sustainable if the sector was market-led as opposed to production-led.

The strategy is in place, potential export markets have been identified and are being cultivated by Bord Bia. However, there remains a nagging doubt about whether Irish farmers are fully bought in for the ethos or just there to capture the money.

It has been in farmers' DNA to drive efficiency and maximise efficiency and output through breeding, feeding and land maintenance and development.

Embracing organic requires a change of mindset built around the less is more principle. That should translate into less output, but more money for what is produced. The money exists at present, but it is more in production support than from market returns in many cases.

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