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

He was speaking at the 2025 'Finding Common Ground' conference in the RDS on Wednesday 9 April where discussions focused on the opportunities for new land use change.

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 and 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.

Food security

However, associate professor in agri-sustainability at ATU David Styles said that if the only concern is producing protein and food security, Irish farmers could produce more protein than they do now with probably half the land.

"So doing things as they are is not necessarily the best way to deliver food security. I think there's good reasons we do things as they are and I do agree that farmers have been led to do certain things - farmers are responding to the policy environment," he said.

Styles added that it would be "strongly in the interest" of farmers to engage with policymakers to have an open, honest conversation about what those sustainable futures are that can deliver livelihoods into the future.