The ageing farming population in Ireland has a potential impact on innovation adoption, head of knowledge transfer at Teagasc Stan Lalor has said.

Despite a lot of efforts, the stats in relation to generational renewal seem to be going in the wrong direction, he told the European council of young farmers conference on Wednesday.

"Ireland, like many European countries, is very heavily skewed in terms of an ageing profile of farmers.

"The average age of farmers is increasing slightly, which has its impacts. About one-third of registered farm owners are over 65," he said.

Progress

There is a lot of progress, he added, around making the sector more suitable as a career.

"In terms of developing youth, we would be very much focused on a succession plan and the support around that.

"It's very important that we have the pool of people who are interested to get into farming careers and have the vehicle by which they get there."

Lalor said that Teagasc is dealing with about 3,000 agricultural students every year between their full-time, part-time and distance education programmes.

"While we need to be encouraging young farmers into the system, we also need to have the encouragement at the other end of the system in terms of the attractiveness of people to hand on the farm."

This, he said, is often a critical area when it comes to policy debate in terms of where supports should be targeted.

"Do we target incentives to help farmers up and running and the balance of that with the supports at the other end to incentivise farmers out and into a handover," he said.

De-risk

However, the "overarching principle" of farm succession and young farmers coming through who want to take on new innovation is that they can take the plunge with as little risk as possible, Lalor said.

"How can we, as much as possible, de-risk it for the early adopters is key," he said.