Like a lot of people, I think a lot about where Irish farming is heading.

I am employed to track the politics of Irish farming and report on them, so it’s my job.

But I also farm, and have been committed to farming since I decided not to fill out a CAO form 39 years ago.

I’m still on the journey that decision led to, and there are a few miles on the road yet. Furthermore, like most farmers, I’m hoping that someone emerges to take over from me when my race is run.

So the long-term future of farming matters hugely to me, it’s not simply a case of survive the next 10 years and cash in my chips.

This is not something that is confined to farming - most family businesses share the aspiration for continuity, whether it’s a shop or pub, an accounting or auctioneering firm, an agricultural merchants or contractors.

Farming has changed in one regard - the rising tide no longer lifts all boats.

Specialisation has seen the typical multi-enterprise mixed farm reduced to a minority of dairy-with-beef or mixed drystock or tillage/drystock.

Most farms are predominantly devoted to dairy, cattle, sheep or tillage.

Pigs and poultry, once on every farm, are now the exclusive province of a few hundred large-scale operators.

With specialisation has come divergence. Most farmers once had a foot in a few camps, leading to a degree of common cause across most issues.

Increasingly, we see farmers divided down the middle. Sometimes this is obvious - tillage farmers want the highest possible price for grain and protein crops, livestock farmers want feed ration to be as cheap as possible.

But often it’s a resource war. The battle for CAP payments pitched farmer against farmer, representative organisation against representative organisation.

As carbon seems set to become the new quota for farming, we have seen beef farmers outraged at the reduction shoehorned into the BEAM scheme.

Dairy farmers are apprehensive that their cow numbers will be capped or cut, and angry that after a decade of exhortation to take advantage of the end of dairy quotas, everybody now seems to be wagging their fingers and shaking their heads at them.

However, I don’t think the fault line that will define the years ahead will be between dairy and drystock. I don’t think it will be a binary east/west divide either.

It’s going to be soil type, if the recent presentation by Gary Lanigan to the ASA is anything to go by.

Prof Lanigan is principal research officer in Teagasc Johnstown. In his presentation, he spoke of the ability of Irish farmland to sequester carbon. For many, the hope is that this will prove to be the silver bullet that offsets the emissions from our animals.

Unfortunately, the evidence as presented by Prof Lanigan poured cold comfort on that prospect. Irish soils emit more carbon than they sequester, he said. He went on to point out that the majority of our farmland sequesters some carbon every year. However, a minority of land, less than 10%, is a massive emitter of carbon.

The land that is emitting carbon is peatland soil. Prof Lanigan says it comprises about 8% of all farmland, about 350,000ha. The 20t per ha of carbon released adds up to 9m tonnes every year.

This completely overwhelms any positive effect created by sequestration from the 4m ha of mineral soils.

An estimated 0.5t/ha of carbon is trapped, a total of about 2m tonnes.

By way of comparison, enteric fermentation, the methane produced by livestock, totals about 12.3m tonnes. So 8% of our land base is as problematic as three-quarters of our cattle herd in terms of gross carbon emissions.

We may be able to find a way to reach our 2030 sectoral targets without needing to confront what will become an incredibly emotive and divisive issue.

For the only way we know of to stop peatland from emitting emissions is to return it to its natural state - rewetting.

Peatland when wet is dense and traps the carbon released from the breakdown of vegetation over thousands of years that produces such rich, dark, soil. Dry it through drainage, the soil particles are looser, and the gases escape.

Scientists know this and the Government knows this. But the Government isn’t really talking about this, and it’s easy to understand why.

The rewetting of farmland, much of it rich and fertile, essentially forces the farmer to cease what he is doing.

In many cases it would involve the reversal of generations of painstaking and backbreaking work draining the land to make it suitable for farming. This work was done at the encouragement of government.

No one knew what was coming down the tracks, but here we are.

While we mightn’t need to comprehensively address CO2 emissions from peatland this decade, if we look a little further down the tracks a very different picture emerges.

Ireland has signed up to zero carbon by 2050. Farming will be expected to be zero carbon by then, or as near as dammit to zero.

And there is no hope of that happening if we continue to farm peatlands the way we are doing at present. The figures simply can’t add up.

Dr David Styles delivered this stark message to the ICMSA conference late last year. In a way, that message was missed, because the flip side of what he was saying was music to farmers’ ears.

He said that reducing the national herd won’t achieve our long-term emissions targets. He said that cow numbers are essentially a sideshow.

This would be particularly true if we continue to find ways of reducing emissions from cows in the coming decades, work that is only really starting and is showing real promise.

But the reason it’s a sideshow is because according to Dr Styles, without significant afforestation and significant rewetting of peatlands, any and all other measures are futile. This is something that will have to happen.

Our peatland farmland is scattered all over the country. There are degrees of how peaty soil is, of course. It’s not as simple as a binary peatland/mineral soil dividing line.

But amid all the debate and division that addressing future dairy expansion (or contraction) or the size of the suckler herd, the wider truth exists and will continue to exist.

We have all seen films or documentaries of where valleys have been cleared in other countries to build dams and flood farmland.

Our own history is scarred with plantations, land seizure and evictions.

It’s hard to think of a more emotive subject for Irish farming to confront.

But we have to heed the warnings of scientists like Prof Lanigan and Dr Styles.

The real uncomfortable question at the heart of Irish farming is how we manage our peatlands over the next 30 years.