Despite the need for farmers to diversify, all of Ireland’s good agricultural land can not be lost to other land uses, Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) regional chair for south Leinster Paul O’Brien has said.

O’Brien highlighted how 30 billion meals will need to be produced every single day by 2050 to feed the world’s population.

“The reality is that we do need farming, we do need farming to produce food. There’s an ever-increasing ask for farmers to be participants in energy production.

“More and more of our farmers are being approached by solar companies to be a part of wind turbine energy as well.

“We can’t lose all of our good agricultural land to other uses when we have a demand coming forward that there’ll be 10 billion people on the planet in 2050,” he said.

Farmers, he said, will always embrace change and while there are a good number of young people coming on stream by 2050, O’Brien maintained that they will not be able to produce enough to meet population demands.