New maximum nutrient allowances for lands located around milking parlours have been proposed, the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.

The interdepartmental Nitrates Expert Group has advised that the current online slurry movement system used to notify the Department of Agriculture of slurry movements between farms should “be expanded to allow farmers to report any slurry movement to their own out-blocks”.

The group suggested that any lands not adjacent to parlours that “milking cows may not be able to walk to” are considered out-blocks in this context.

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It said that a “lower chemical nitrogen allowance should be applied if the farmer cannot demonstrate that livestock manure is being spread across the entire farm holding”.

An entirely new table should be drawn up setting out how much chemical fertiliser is allowable under different grazing platform slurry spreading rates, the group said.

Ministers’ decision

The recommendation was one of a series of draft regulatory measures officially proposed to Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon and Minister for Housing James Browne as they prepare a new Nitrates Action Programme.

The current programme ends in December and the new plan is to go to public consultation in September, and due to enter force from next January.

The Nitrates Expert Group consists of senior officials from the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Housing, the Environmental Protection Agency and Teagasc.

Nutrient inputs

The measure outlined above seeks to address milking platforms receiving a higher proportion of a farm’s nutrient inputs through slurry and grazing than out-blocks receive, even when the farm remains within maximum allowable fertiliser limits as a whole.

The group’s recommendations stated that although regulatory limits for nitrogen and phosphorus applications are currently applied over the total land area of an individual farm, “for practical and economic reasons, the distribution of these nutrients may not fully extend to the out-blocks”.

It said that research underway at Teagasc “should further inform this measure” as a definition of the milking platform will be needed, as well as the establishment of a limit on the maximum nutrient load for the grazing platform.

The recommendation document does not suggest that beef farmers could be hit with any additional similar limitations on chemical fertiliser allowances around farmyards, nor that they would have to notify the Department of slurry movements to out-blocks under the proposals.