While at home all eyes and indeed much political attention has been focused on court injunctions, farmer protests and beef taskforce meetings, the political wheel continues to turn in Brussels.

This week saw Phil Hogan step down as European commissioner for agriculture. He will of course still play a critical role in shaping the future of Irish agriculture as he takes on the trade portfolio – whether it is shaping the future trading relationship with the UK, solving the EU-US trade dispute that has ramped up tariffs on Irish dairy products into the US or ensuring safeguard mechanisms agreed as part of the Mercosur deal are implemented.

Meanwhile, Polish politician Janusz Wojciechowski now assumes the agriculture portfolio. While he didn’t officially take up his role until 1 December, Wojciechowski gave an indication of his focus to EU farm organisations last week. He picked up on Hogan’s theme of attracting new entrants to farming, recognising the loss in number of farmers and acknowledging the need to grant more flexibility to member states in how they implement CAP at national level. The latter point would give member states the scope to design bespoke policies and schemes to meet national objectives, although they would still require approval from Brussels for these schemes.

Environmental programmes were already high on the agenda of the outgoing Commission’s CAP proposals, but these will be given further emphasis by the incoming Commission’s commitment to producing a “green deal” in its first 100 days.

Environment to the fore

At this stage, Commissioner Wojciechowski appears to be adopting a similar position to his predecessor with his comments that farmers are “the first protectors of the environment”.

While we can take this as an indication that the incoming commissioner will follow much of his predecessor’s framework, there is still a long way to go before the next CAP is finalised.

We can expect a Polish commissioner to push for faster full convergence across all member states. The European Parliament’s agriculture committee has already voted for 100% national convergence by 2027, compared with the 75% recommended in the Commission’s CAP proposals.

Protecting the 2021-2027 CAP budget will be the first big hurdle against which farmers will measure the performance of the incoming commissioner

The nature of the CAP, since the start of the move to flat-rate payments, has been to create division among farmers, leading to a fragmentation of farmer representation as winners and losers were created by each reform. That pattern seems as if it will continue and will be even more painful if a 5% reduction in the CAP budget is implemented.

Protecting the 2021-2027 CAP budget will be the first big hurdle against which farmers will measure the performance of the incoming commissioner.

He has made his pitch for funding, citing that the CAP delivers food security which – along with energy and military security – is one of the three essential security elements of the EU. But he will certainly have a battle on his hands. It looks increasingly unlikely that the bloc of northern EU countries will be persuaded to increase their contribution to Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) in order to offset the deficit created by Brexit.

Impact on Ireland

If unsuccessful, the financial impact on Irish farmers will be in the region of €700m over the lifetime of the next CAP or €100m less per annum flowing into rural Ireland. Mounting the necessary political pressure to ensure that this is not the case is where farmers need to be targeting their attention.

Yes, more farmer-facing issues such as 30 months, four movements and Bord Bia labels might gain quick support for the plethora of fledgling farm organisations, but the reality is that any marginal gains secured on these issues will be dwarfed if the CAP budget is not protected.

It is time for farmer attention and the political agenda to get focused on what is happening in Brussels.

At current prices, generating renewable energy is more expensive than buying fossil fuels. Therefore, the importance of a robust, long-term support scheme to help drive farm level investment in renewables cannot be overstated.

More details of the long-awaited Renewable Energy Support Scheme were released this week. It is specifically designed to ramp up Ireland’s renewable electricity generation. Its proposed auction-based design will allow large wind and solar installations to bid for secure energy prices at the lowest cost to the State. However, this will mean that farm-scale renewable electricity installations will struggle to compete, so our farmers will once again miss out on opportunities afforded in other EU countries.

Just this week, members of the Renewable Gas Forum of Ireland presented their case for biomethane to be part of Ireland’s energy mix to the Joint Committee on Climate Action. This renewable gas can be produced by upgrading biogas from anaerobic digestion. Farm-based anaerobic digesters can utilise a range of materials to produce this with spin-offs for the economy of rural Ireland.

This week we have a seven-page Focus which explores some of the key technical areas of anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion is complex but offers great opportunities. Its potential depends on a robust, secure biomethane support scheme that is fully accessible to farmers.

The Teagasc National Dairy Conference signalled a number of proposed research changes for dairy farmers. By far the most significant concerned chemical nitrogen. Dr Padraig French strongly indicated that the practice of spreading 250kg of nitrogen per hectare would shift towards 150kg/ha in future research work. Teagasc’s research roadmap now has a target of 150kg of artificial nitrogen, with the remainder of nitrogen required coming from white clover. Furthermore, the policy now is to use protected urea instead of CAN and urea when spreading nitrogen fertiliser.

Teagasc policy is responding to the environmental agenda. While this should be encouraged, it is essential that the research agenda shapes the direction of environmental policy rather than trying to validate it. A situation where policy gets ahead of research is a high-risk strategy that could hit farm incomes.

Environmentally, cutting nitrogen use on dairy farms by 40% per hectare makes sense but what are the implications on farm output and profit? Have we solid research and a commercial farm blueprint that ensures high clover swards and a move to protected urea will allow farm output to be maintained?

There are research gaps in how best to establish and maintain high clover swards. It is also very early days in the usage and efficacy of protected urea.

As herd fertility dominated the research agenda in the 1990s and 2000s, it looks like nitrogen use efficiency will dominate the 2020s.

The Bord Bia market monitor is already proving its worth to farmers. It left Meat Industry Ireland (MII) with nowhere to hide at Tuesday’s taskforce meeting.

There was an acceptance that markets had shifted and that Irish prices were not keeping pace. The reference by MII to “green shoots” at a time when farmers are incurring heavy losses while prices in key beef markets are soaring has only created more frustration – as have attempts by processors to shift the blame for poor prices back on to the farmer protests.

While the protests undoubtedly have had an impact, processors would do well to remember events of the past (in which they were centrally involved) that were much more damaging to our beef markets than a few weeks of disrupted supply – the most recent being the horsemeat scandal.

As demonstrated by Phelim O’Neill, in recent weeks the market opportunity exists for a significant price rise to be passed back to beef farmers. The first step is for farmers to start demanding this from agents.