The Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) has responded to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) provisional greenhouse gas emissions report for 2021 and said that the increase in emissions from agriculture reflects post-quota decisions which were driven by Government policy.

The report says that emissions from agriculture increased by 2.8% in 2021, with an overall increase of 5% across all sectors.

IFA president Tim Cullinan said: "Farmers were urged to expand and have invested heavily in their businesses.

“They are committed to doing their fair share to see emissions reduce by 22% by 2030, but it will take time for the substantial changes in practice that are taking place at farm level to be reflected in the emissions figures,” Cullinan said.

Milk output and fertiliser use are down in 2022 and there is a natural levelling off in cow numbers, he said.

“In addition, the EPA are using international multipliers to calculate methane output per cow.

"Teagasc trials are now showing that cows grazing outdoors produce less methane than the systems in other counties," he added.

This data, he said, needs to be peer reviewed, but it could make a significant difference to farm sector emissions figures.

Teagasc

Director of Teagasc professor Frank O'Mara said that it's very important that farmers start adopting the new technologies that are available to them.

"The increases that we've seen this year and last year bring us back roughly to the level that we had in 2018, which is the base year for fixing of the carbon budgets.

"We'd really want to see progress being made in reducing those emissions over the remainder of this decade," he told RTÉ's News At One with Brian Dobson on Thursday.

The most important thing at the moment according to O'Mara was where the sector can make immediate progress.

"The low-hanging fruit and the area where we can make immediate progress is on the nitrous oxide emissions.

"What farmers have been doing is reducing their use of chemical fertiliser and we want to see further reductions in that.

"The methane side is obviously the harder side, but if we can concentrate on what we can do now, I think that's important," he said.

O'Mara argued that the Teagasc Signpost programme will make a significant difference in reducing emissions.

"We've some fairly important work ongoing at the moment in terms of looking at the emissions from our dairy cows.

"We are in the second year of it now and the emissions are actually lower than what we have been assuming," he said.

This work, he added, is under peer review.

Slurry

He said that 10% of all methane emissions come from slurry, adding: "I think we can aggressively tackle that side of the emissions."