Letter in support of funding research into uplands

DEAR EDITOR

Comghairdeas to Teagasc and CAFRE for the uplands symposium in Antrim last week.

The Scottish and CAFRE/AFBI research highlighted we are not funding Teagasc or southern universities to do our own peer reviewed research on uplands particularly with cattle. It’s great that such work is done at Ambleside, Glenwherry, Pwllpeiran and the SRUC, but none of those locations are in the EU. This matters and has consequences, as for example when the EU followed Hungarian not British research on management of wet heath.

The resultant legislation guides us farming in the Bluestacks to graze in the future with water buffalo, rather than the Dexters that have grazed our mountains for centuries in harmony with nature.

“Restored and rewetted peatlands can continue to be used productively such as grazing water buffalo, or blueberry and cranberry cultivation.” Regulation 2024/1991.

We have plenty of famine-era lazy beds, but little evidence of cranberry cultivation.

Refusing to fund Teagasc to do uplands research has societal consequences.

It leaves tens of thousands of hectares to be grazed solely by deer on NPWS, unplanted Coillte lands and An Taisce land, with no science showing how this is optimal for biodiversity or carbon sequestration.

It allows Government policy to undermine Article 45 (2) V of the Constitution to allow the State to compete with young aspiring farmers to buy land for “rewilding”.

By rewilding I mean resources are rarely provided to fence deer out to allow the ecological succession that happens in proper rewilding.

It sends our negotiators for a new CAP to Brussels, lacking Irish scientific papers to justify on environmental grounds arguments for supports for us upland farmers and leaves us dependent on Hungarians to tell us how to manage our wet and dry heaths.

It leaves us designing environmental schemes without knowing what is the optimum livestock species mix, grazing season or stocking density on the uplands to maximise biodiversity, water quality and carbon sequestration.

We are world leaders in dairy, intensive beef and tillage, but fly blind in managing 20% of our agricultural area.

We have the 14th largest area of peatland as a proportion of total land area in the world, the 24th largest store of peat carbon stock in the world (source: UN-FCC) yet have no published papers (I can find anyways, can you?) on what grazing deer, cattle or indeed sheep does to those carbon stocks.

Can we urgently find the funds to appoint a professor of uplands research at Teagasc or an Irish agricultural faculty who can write grant applications to lead such Irish research?