I heard that you can’t grow potatoes under that new Tillage Incentive Scheme and potatoes are our most famous tillage crop.

We import an awful lot of them too, so surely an incentive would be a good thing. Someone told me lately that less than 60% of the potatoes sold in Ireland are grown in Ireland.

It’s a strange old scheme. A neighbour of mine planted 4ac more beans than normal last February to save on nitrogen. He was considering ploughing 9ac of grass, but he’s after learning he’ll only get paid the €160/ac for 5ac because of the extra beans, so he left it so.

Feels more like a reseeding scheme to me, there’ll be plenty of grass thrown into the spring barley crops I’d say.