Oxfam, one of the world’s leading charities in tackling global hunger, has been scathing of countries and corporations that proclaim net zero targets for a future date based on mitigation measures involving land use.

As Phelim O’Neill explains this week, it has become common practice for big business to announce swathes of tree planting as a means of achieving net zero rather than seeking to reduce total emission production. Most recently in Ireland, we saw an insurer claim to be “offsetting” emissions linked to the private cars they insure by, in part, planting trees.

The point Oxfam makes is valid. Choosing to tackle the issue of emissions by mitigation measures avoids the hard work of reducing emissions in the business in favour of outsourcing the solution in a way that involves using huge tracts of land.

While we may debate the impact of land use change in Ireland in a social and societal context, in the poorer parts of the world, switching land use from food production to greenhouse gas mitigation measures becomes literally a question of life and death. According to Oxfam, all the farmland in the world would be required to deliver the net-zero pledges made through mitigation or offsets. This would result in prohibitively expensive food for many and even if it continued to be affordable in the developed world, it would mean hunger and further poverty in many other areas.

In a world with a growing population, land has to be prioritised for food production, and systems that both produce food and sequester carbon should be promoted, such as Ireland’s farming model.

This week's cartoon

\ Jim Cogan

Next generation putting best foot forward

Last Saturday saw the Irish Farmers Journal partner with FBD Insurance and the Irish Shows Association for our all-Ireland young stockperson competition in Tullamore Mart. The event was a huge success with close to 40 young people spending the day taking part in different competitions from stock judging, to halter making to showing animals in the ring.

It’s a sector that has always attracted huge interest from young people and for some fosters an interest in livestock and agriculture that shapes their future career.

Ensuring we continue to retain the energy and innovation that these young people bring to the sector is critical to its future development.

Our thanks to everybody involved including FBD and the Irish Shows Association and hopefully we can build on this year’s event for a bigger and better event in 2022.

Good weather, yields and prices

The harvest of 2021 will be remembered for its rather unique combination of good yields, good prices and predominantly good weather. On top of that, virtually all the grain was harvested by the end of August despite the late start.

While this will not be a record year for yields, there were a lot of very good yields achieved in all crops. The combination of increased winter cropping, good yields and a 3% increase in area will likely push the national harvest up between 2.4mt and 2.5mt. And there was very little rejection for malting barley growers.

While there are no formal harvest prices yet, it seems likely that green barley price will be up €45 to €50/t on last year with wheat up over €30/t. But these compare with imported maize which is up over €70/t.