Tillage area will decline next year and the Government is not doing enough or anything to try to meet the target to increase tillage area in this country, according to members of the tillage industry.

At a Tillage Industry Ireland (TII) meeting last week, some members answered a series of the same questions for the Irish Farmers Journal’s Tillage Podcast.

There were two questions which all members resoundingly agreed on and that was that the tillage area will decline in 2026 and that the Government is not doing enough to meet the target of increasing the tillage area to 400,000ha by 2030.

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Here’s some of what those members had to say. You can listen to the full interviews on the Tillage Podcast.

Will the tillage area increase, decrease or stay the same?

One merchant stated he expects tillage area to remain stable in Wexford, but does expect a decrease in other areas. Others all expect a decline in area.

TII chair Andy Doyle was clear on this question: “I think that there is no question that it is going to decrease.

"The people that we’re all talking to are just losing land left, right and centre. Be that land to dairy farms in a renewal of leasing or solar farming or whatever.

"Everybody seems to be losing land and there’s nobody getting more land that I’m hearing."

Andy noted that an odd dairy farm is moving to tillage, but this is the exception.

He also stated: “I don’t like saying it, but it does require short-term money, at least on a once-off basis and maybe more than that just depending on how the current crisis is going to continue.”

Michael Burke representing Acorn Independent Merchants said: “We are definitely going to lose some tillage area this year because if someone is part-time tillage farming, they will probably remain because it's suiting them from a rotational point of view, but those who are serious about tillage and particularly those who are on rented land are getting it very, very difficult to make ends meet."

Trevor Cooke, who represents agri-chemical retailers, said: “I think winter acreagae will hold up well, but we’re losing land. Already some of my customers are telling me that they’re struggling to hold on to land, so there’s land being lost from the system already.”

Is the Government doing enough to meet its target of increasing tillage area to 400,000ha by 2030?

Walter Furlong Jr, Cooney Furlong Grain Company, representing the Irish Fertiliser Blenders and Manufacturers Association on TII

“No I don’t [think it will increase]. I think it’s a little bit of contradiction. It’s hard to increase the tillage sector, increase the forestry sector, increase this sector, it’s all the same land and right now the dairy sector is the strongest sector in the industry.

“It’s hard to compete with them for land prices, etc, but it's not necessarily the dairy sector’s fault that they’re paying for these land prices. The derogation is a cause of this. It’s nearly pitching one sector against another and we don’t want to do that either.

“I’m not in favour of massive payments or massive Government handouts. I think there is always a catch 22, but right now I think something has to be looked at in terms of paying us for our carbon.”

Andy Doyle, TII chair

“Arguably we’re doing nothing. There’s no other way to say it. That’s not saying they’re doing no work to try [to] do it.

"We know we have to accept that there’s a lot of work going on in the background to look at the various suggestions that were in Food Vision, but all of those things take a lot of time.

"If there was a different crisis in another sector, there probably would have been a much greater resource thrown at it to try [to] solve the problem.

“There are people doing something, but there are no measures in place that are actually going to make a tangible difference yet.”

Michael Burke of Grennans, representing Acorn Independent Merchants

“Currently, there have been several schemes that the Government has effectively held back on and they should be brought to the fore and an immediate payment towards the sustainability of tillage. Because there is an ambition to grow the tillage area, but it’s going to shrink not grow in my opinion.

“They have done nothing specific so far. They’ve had a year of meetings with people, but no action has taken place so far and we need to see something that is going to permanently move some land into tillage and ring-fence it and ring-fence the payment to the farmer as opposed to the landowner.”

Trevor Cooke, Federation of Agri-Chemical Retail Merchants chair

“No, is the short answer. The 400,000ha, from what we see at the minute, hasn’t a hope of being achieved.

"We’re going backwards every year and have been for the past number of years.

"This year, hopefully, we won’t see a big slip, but if we got poor weather in the autumn, we could see a significant slip in acreage, but, definitely, we haven’t a hope of hitting our 400,000ha target.”