Irish farmers may feel like they are at the sharp end of the competing needs of food production and minimising the damage mankind inflicts on the natural world.

Gerald Potterton accurately encapsulated the world-weariness of many farmers in his column in this week’s paper.

Others are angry, another cohort are frightened, particularly farmers on peatland who are bracing themselves for whatever is coming in the LULUCF sectoral target next year. They fear being forced to take the hit for the sins of the sector.

The arguments farmers make are now well-versed. A key one is that cattle numbers in Ireland are largely static over recent decades, so they aren’t the cause of global warming.

A parallel argument is that these static numbers can hardly be the cause of air and water pollution. Farmers would suggest we look to roads and to the skies for the solution as to why emissions have been rising and are continuing to rise.

Dutch experience

The reality is that the scale of the challenge facing Irish farming pales in comparison with what is happening in the Netherlands. That’s the coalface. The Netherlands has far bigger environmental challenges facing it, and has started to take farmers out. Others are being bought out by commercial interests competing for environmental budgets.

What many people mightn’t realise is that it’s nitrogen, not carbon, that is currently the most pressing issue facing Dutch farming.

While we are focusing on global warming, CO2 emissions, biogenic methane and cow numbers, in the Netherlands it’s air pollution, nitrogen emissions, slurry and chemical fertiliser volumes, and, well, yes, cow numbers.

The Netherlands has 2.1m ha of farmed land. That’s half the total land area of the Netherlands, a country half the size of the island of Ireland, with a human population of 17.5m. The Dutch value land so much they built the polder walls to enclose land below sea level and make it habitable.

Overall numbers

The overall numbers of the Netherlands make interesting reading. In every case, I am comparing them to the Republic of Ireland.

Their farmland base of 2.1m ha is about half that of Ireland’s 4.4m ha of farmland.

The Dutch cattle herd is 3.8m, 60% that of Ireland’s 6.5m herd.

The Dutch dairy herd is 1.6m cows, identical to our expanded herd.

There are 11.4m pigs, to our 1.6m - almost 10 times as many.

They have about 100m poultry birds, to our 11m, again 10 times as many.

The Dutch arable land area is over 1m ha, compared with Ireland’s 340,000ha.

The Dutch thus have half their farmed land in crops, compared with our 7.5%.

This leaves the Dutch with about 1m ha of grassland, compared with Ireland’s 4m ha, a hugely significant statistic.

The Dutch land base has been absorbing all the cattle and pig slurry, and all the poultry litter, for decades.

Yes, the Dutch are way ahead of us in terms of anaerobic digestion (AD) and are making huge strides at present. A new facility in Groene Mineralen Centrale will convert 100,000t of animal waste and 35,000t of municipal waste into biogas. The digestate is a low N & P soil improver, with a liquid fertiliser and solid phosphorus for use in chemical fertiliser products.

And you won’t be surprised to hear that the levels of untreated sewage still being discharged into Irish rivers would be considered a national scandal in the Netherlands.

Dutch efficiency hasn’t overcome the environmental pressures on air and water quality

But the sheer concentration of people, heavy industry and farming activity in a relatively small country means that even Dutch efficiency hasn’t overcome the environmental pressures on air and water quality.

So now farms are being shut down. There was a lot of publicity last year at the government’s decision to take out 600 farms.

All of Europe will closely watch as the affected farmers level of compensation is determined. Equally interesting will be the land-use options allowed for the land involved.

Outmanoeuvred

Meanwhile, we set targets and talk about reaching them with little or no action from Government. There won’t be a suckler cessation scheme, we know, although there might be a dairy cessation scheme.

It looks like the Minister completely outmanoeuvred the farm organisations on the suckler cessation scheme. He proposed one, they opposed it on the grounds that suckler farmers shouldn’t be asked to exit to compensate for recent and/or future dairy expansion.

The Minister then withdrew the offer, saving himself the job of going to Michael McGrath and Paschal Donohue for funding for a scheme to reduce suckler cow numbers that are falling already.

And saying it was because he had listened to farmer AND processor representatives puts the farm organisations in a place they never feel very comfortable, alongside Larry Goodman and Niall Browne.

Three-dimensional political chess

Meanwhile, older suckler farmers are wondering where their exit option has vanished to. It’s three-dimensional political chess from the minister.

The dairy cessation scheme is more likely to happen.

And in this case, I’m predicting now that Charlie McConalogue will expect the farmer-owned milk processors (and Kerry Group) to pony up part-funding for the scheme.

The Teagasc national farm survey in 2020 showed 15% of dairy herds with less than 40 cows - that’s well over 2,000 farmers with quite small scale.

It’s safe to assume that many of these are older than average, which puts them well into their 60s. They are also far less likely to have an identified heir willing to continue milking cows. Not all these farmers will want to exit, but many surely will.

I understand that Glanbia Ireland (now Tirlán) were surprised at the volume of interest, if not the final uptake, of the fairly limited voluntary cessation scheme they offered farmers when trying to manage peak milk supply back in 2021.

Airport!

It’s now emerging that a number of Dutch dairy farmers have been bought out by an airport.

Schiphol Amsterdam is world famous, serving as a hub for flights to every corner of the globe (a phrase that handily speaks to both flat-earthers and the rest of us).

Irish students on J1's to the USA, Irish people flying from Cork, Shannon or Knock to China and Australia will have passed through it.

Seventy-two million passengers passed through in 2019, pre-pandemic, twice the number of passengers in Ireland’s four main airports combined. You might remember the chaos at Schiphol last summer as they struggled to cope with renewed post-lockdown demand for flights.

The Dutch government has now stated that the number of flights annually must be reduced by over 10%. But Schiphol has a plan. It has, over the last decade, bought a second airport, about 50km outside Amsterdam.

Lelystad is a tiny old aerodrome, but a new runway and terminal building have been planned. (I wonder if Lely the agricultural machinery company come from the same area.)

The problem for Schiphol is that they can’t run new flights from Lelystad due to nitrogen emissions limits.

Solution

The solution? They have bought out a number of farms' production rights as an offset. Some information is emerging as to the nature of the farms and the arrangements. It seems four farms were bought outright, and another eight sold their nitrogen quotas to Schiphol. They were probably pretty big units, as over €20m was spent in these acquisitions.

There is controversy this week that a local authority wanted to streamline a nitrogen production rights trading process, which would impact on the price farmers could negotiate for themselves.

And local authorities are not just passive observers of this dynamic. Last month, government agency Rijkswaterstaat partially bought out six farmers in the Veluwe region, in the province of Gelderland to improve a local ring road.

Is it a view of the future in Ireland? Probably, although the precious commodity will be carbon credits/quotas rather than nitrogen rights. Among commercial interests competing for limited carbon quotas here in this country, the buying power of the aviation industry, construction and others will dwarf the resources of farmers.

We have already seen Coillte, a giant in resource terms in an Irish context, bring in a UK investment group to help them buy afforested land. What hope have the rest of us?