Teagasc director Frank O’Mara has declined to comment on the likelihood of the State body purchasing a Co Mayo holding which it formerly leased and operated as a hill demonstration farm.

The 687ac property at Derrintin outside Leenane is currently for sale by private treaty and has an asking price in the region of €1.2 million.

It was leased by Teagasc for close to 20 years from the 1990s, but O’Mara would not be drawn when asked by the Irish Farmers Journal if the State body was considering purchasing the farm.

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“We’d love to have more facilities, but any land we buy will have to have a very strong business case,” said O’Mara.

“As regards any particular piece of land, we don’t comment publicly - good or bad,” he added.

“Teagasc has a great portfolio of land. We don’t have an upland farm and we recognise that, but this hasn’t stopped us from doing research relevant to the sector,” O’Mara insisted.

Performance

The Teagasc director was talking on the margins of the hill sheep conference which was held in Westport, Co Mayo, on Wednesday (18 February) evening.

The question of hill sheep research and Teagasc’s performance in that space was also an issue raised during the conference.

“I won’t say we’re not doing anything at all in hill sheep research, we certainly are,” O’Mara told those in attendance.

“We recognise we have a responsibility to generate the knowledge, to do the research, so that we can farm those uplands better and do it in a way that is both profitable and sustainable,” he said.

“A number of years ago, we said we needed to get a programme going on this and the area where we thought we could make the greatest contribution was around the finishing of the hill lambs,” he explained.

“We’d certainly like to be doing more if we could and that’s why we take opportunities with the hill better farms that we have,” O’Mara said.

“We use those to gather some data that we can learn things from and then translate across all farms,” he added.

The Teagasc director also pointed out that the agency has been involved with upland European Innovation Partnerships.

“But we’d always like to be doing more and we certainly recognise the importance of the uplands. As I said previously, there are around 350,000 farmed acres in the uplands, so it’s a big part of Ireland’s farming landscape,” O’Mara said.