DEAR SIR: Further to John Sharry’s letter [Call for environmentalists and farmers to work together, July 22], farmers are, in fact, our front-line environmentalists and those who pontificate and condescend in talking about cutting the national herd need to be vigorously challenged.

Irish farmers make a great contribution and play a crucial role in the production of food in a carbon efficient manner and play their part in supporting food security worldwide.

An additional factor is the complete absence recently of promoting farm afforestation as a way to assist farmers offset carbon emissions.

That same activity would contribute enormously to Ireland honouring its lower carbon footprint due to carbon sequestration, quite apart from the many other benefits of growing timber.

However, we have a Green Party leader who appears to discourage planting, stating recently ‘farmers don’t want to give up the land’ and rarely mentioning farm forestry at all.

Farmers have made an enormous contribution to afforestation in Ireland in the last 30 years, which is now being squandered by a mire of bureaucracy in getting licences to plant, thin or fell. This, more than anything, is discouraging farmers from committing land to such a worthy and financially viable project. Eamon Ryan also talks a lot about ‘re-wetting’ land as a contribution to carbon sequestration.

As I understand it, re-wetted land will take 500 to 1,000 years before it sequesters carbon, while afforestation sequesters carbon virtually as soon as the land is planted. You couldn’t make it up!