With Budget 2026 now less than three weeks away, efforts to secure funding for farming are intensifying.

The IFA was in conversation with Public Expenditure Minister Jack Chambers at the National Ploughing Championships on Tuesday.

In particular, it stressed the need for €60m in funding to be committed in the budget toward the tillage sector, following through on Agriculture Minister Martin Heydon’s exhortation at last Friday’s tillage crisis meeting to raise their concerns with Government ministers present at the Ploughing.

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He lowered expectations, as to the likelihood of the €250/ha asked for by the IFA being gained. The minister pointed to external pressures limiting the Government’s spending plans for next year, and the internal budgetary pressure within his department due to the massive increase in spending on TB.

Bill O’Keeffe, the IFA’s farm business chair is clear that extra funding required due to the spiralling level of affected herds must come from outside the Department of Agriculture’s budget.

“Farmers are working hard to minimise the possibility of TB infection, and thousands are being forced to deal with the hardship and income loss due to having reactor cattle and restricted herds, in no small part due to the government’s inability to deal with escalating wildlife numbers,” he said.

“The cost of TB should not now extend into affecting essential Government spending programmes for farming.”

O’Keeffe highlighted that there is one ask of IFA to Government that does not involve funding.

“The Residential Zoned Land Tax should not be applied to actively farmed land,” he said, and it’s not just IFA saying this.

Simon Harris, the then Taoiseach of what is the same Government as we have today, made a clear commitment on RZLT.

“No active farmer is going to pay a residential land tax,” Harris said, adding RZLT “is absolutely about making sure people can’t hoard land. It was never meant to be about penalising an active farmer”.

O’Keeffe says that while about 1,200 farmers availed of the exemption in 2025, they had to spend significant amounts of money, often thousands of euro, in making the dezoning application required for an exemption.

Nothing is currently in place for next year, and it can’t be a solution that costs as much as the tax would” he said. “We want an exemption on all land being actively farmed, clear and simple”.