At last week’s National Ploughing Championships, we had plenty of talks about the tillage sector on the Irish Farmers Journal stand. We heard from industry and the Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue. Here are our top quotes from the three days.

"The Food Vision [Group] has spent ages on an interim report. Tillage is going down the swanny. Narrow it down to three or four points and go with it, rather than using a scattergun approach.” – Pat Ryan, managing director of Liffey Mills

Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue wants to see more co-operation between livestock and tillage farmers: "From a dairy farmer’s point of view, exporting the slurry to the tillage farmer is definitely not as expensive as buying the land and still exporting the slurry onto it. We have to look at the whole range of options,” he said.

However, soils expert Robbie Byrne commented on Tuesday that many tillage fields are high in phosphorus, which means they cannot import slurry. Robbie asked: "Is there room on tillage farms for all this slurry? There’s already a lot of slurry being exported to tillage farms.”

"We import two-thirds of the cereal we need. We’ll always give out about South American beef coming into the European market whenever they have less sustainable beef production than our beef sector. We never mention we’re taking cereal from South America, which is the same principle. We don’t bat an eyelid to that.

"We should be growing our tillage sector more because we need that cereal here for our livestock sector, and we can do it really well.” – Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue

"Provenance and Irishness on its own is not going to carry as much weight. To me, the untold story of Irish grain is around its sustainability credentials. It’s the sector with the most attractive sustainability credentials, and it has the lowest carbon footprint. We need to be able to tell that story right through to grain going into our feed.

“The carbon number associated with a percentage inclusion of Irish cereals and beans will carry much more weight in the future than it just being of Irish origin. I think the two of those pieces together can start to turn the dial, and hopefully we can make those claims stronger and louder into the future.” – John Kealy, Tirlán

"Factories will pay 20c/kg for beef with quality assurance. Why not pay another 5c/kg for the cattle that are fed on feed that has a low carbon footprint compared to feed from Brazil or anywhere else?

“Try and feed that through the co-ops, or maybe the Government should be chipping in 1.5c/litre or something like that for people using native grains. We only have so much to go around. We definitely have a problem with this grass-fed beef; thinking that our cattle are finished on grass only, or our milk is produced on zero kilogrammes of feed. We need to tell that story and if we do that, we’ll create a preference for Irish grain.” – Pat Ryan, Liffey Mills

"You’re going to see tillage farmers exiting the sector this year for a number of reasons, but mainly because some will have burned such a hole in their pockets that if they go back and get a year like this next year, they just can’t take a chance.

“We’ve got to sit down once this harvest is over and re-assess it with Teagasc and all the stakeholders, and see how can we support the tillage sector in a year like this. Maybe something like a crop insurance scheme needs to be looked at; minimum inclusion of native grains in rations. We can’t stay doing what we’re doing, because the tillage sector is walking into a wall.” – Francie Gorman, IFA presidential election candidate