Moves are afoot in the US to prevent foreign investors from buying land.

In the wake of the Chinese spy balloon scandal, the cross-party efforts by Democratic senator and farmer Jon Tester and his Republican Senate colleague Mike Rounds saw “foreign adversaries” banned from acquiring land or businesses involved in agriculture.

This mirrors efforts in New Zealand and Australia to prevent business interests from buying farmland. As economic power has moved steadily towards Asia from Europe and North America, farmers felt threatened.

Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals and New Zealand Maori may have issues with the concept of land rights and protection as presented by those current legislatures.

Here in Ireland, we don’t really have a land policy, and we really need one.

We saw how triggering the Coillte-Gresham House issue was. Do we need protection from foreign, particularly State interests, buying land to plant trees and potentially bring future carbon credits home with them?

National conversation

First, we really need a national conversation about land policy, in particular about where the rights of the individual property owner and society intersect.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that a combination of pressures on a static land base has caused a spike in purchase, lease and rental prices.

Dairy expansion has been the main driver for a decade, but now nitrates restrictions mean thousands of farmers need extra land or fewer cows.

Tillage farmers losing land to dairy farmers are calling for slurry export synergies rather than an overheated market.

Drystock farmers who have watched tillage farmers outbid them for decades may be smiling wryly to themselves (much like the Native Americans).

Meanwhile, the Government’s Climate Action Plan wants tillage to grow by 50,000ha over the next seven years. They say they don’t want cow numbers to contract, and they also want 56,000ha planted in forestry.

And then there’s rewetting – the Government has mentioned a figure of 40,000ha by 2030. All those tens of thousands of hectares add up. Then there are the 200 anaerobic digesters envisaged by 2030, which will need as much as 220,000ha of a landbase for feedstock. Solar farms are eating up other acres.

Now comes the EPA report looking towards 2050.

A combined total of 1.1m hectares will have to be afforested or rewet over the next 25 years or so. Remember, the total farming landbase is about 4.4m hectares, plus another half a million hectares of commonage.

Changing land use so profoundly would almost certainly require Government-enforced action at individual farm level.

Farmers on Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) would say their property rights have long been compromised. The rest of farming may be about to find out how that feels.