Cattle and dairy farms with 100 cows or more may need to hold environmental permits in future, a leaked European Commission document seen by the Irish Farmers Journal has proposed.
Pig farms with 250 sows or fattening farms with 416 fatteners or more and poultry farms with 8,500 layers or 17,857 broilers could also need such a permit.
The proposal falls under the EU’s industrial emissions directive and extending the directive to livestock farms “would result in methane and ammonia emission reductions”.
Livestock farms are called “agro-industrial installations” in the document.
The objective of the initiative is to protect “the environment and public health from the adverse effects of pollution from large agro-industrial installations” and to stimulate a “deep agro-industrial transformation” towards a zero-pollution, carbon-neutral, non-toxic environment and circular economy.
Farmer actions
Under the proposal in its current form, farmers applying for permits will have to include the number and types of animals on the holding and the sources of emissions from the farm.
Member state governments are also to ensure that the farmer is monitoring emissions and “associated environmental performance levels” and farmers will have to keep a record of these results for six years.
In the event of non-compliance with the emission limit values and environmental performance limits, the farmer “shall take the measures necessary to ensure that compliance is restored within the shortest possible time”.
Furthermore, it states that farmers are to ensure that any land spreading of waste or animal byproducts generated by the farm is “undertaken in accordance with the best available techniques”.
It also stipulates that farms located close to each other with the same owner or “under the control of operators who are engaged in an economic of legal relationship” will be treated as a single unit in order to calculate the capacity threshold for the permit.
Public access
The proposal states that permits “shall be made available to the public on the internet, free of charge” and that a summary of permits would be made available to the public. This will “increase public participation in decision-making”.
It also states that rules around compliance with the permit will be tightened and in the event of a permit being breached, farming on these livestock, pig and poultry farms could be suspended.
The current draft document states that the proposal is to be negotiated between now and the end of 2023, with technical work to support the act to include livestock farms will take place from early 2024 until 2027.
Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) president Tim Cullinan slammed the proposals, stating that they are completely over the top.
“It's outrageous to be including livestock grazing in fields within the scope of this directive, as well as drastically cutting the limits on the pig and poultry sectors.
“The European Commission need to realise that they need to be supporting farmers to produce food rather than putting more barriers in their way.
“We have a food security crisis and the Commission is focusing on making food production more difficult. This proposal needs to be binned,” he said.
SHARING OPTIONS