Government considers €2bn farm retirement scheme to meet climate targets

A €2 billion farm retirement scheme is being considered by Government in a bid to encourage farmers to exit farming and drastically reduce cow numbers in order to meet climate change targets.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act outline that up to one million cows will need to be culled in order to meet a 25 per cent reduction in emissions for the sector.

“A very significant retirement package would be needed to achieve this level of livestock reduction,” a sectoral briefing from June this year reads.

Beef farmers would be paid up to €3,000 per suckler cow and the document suggests that payments per dairy cow would be higher. The overall aim would be to reduce suckler cow numbers by at least 700,000 and dairy cow numbers by 300,000.

A retirement or exit scheme had been discussed by farming organisations and stakeholders on both the Food Vision Beef and Sheep, and Dairy groups which were formed recently this year.

Confidential draft documents discussed by the Food Vision Beef and Sheep Group, and seen by The Irish Times, considered the option of “an incentivised voluntary reduction scheme that operates over a contract period”.

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However, the document does not mention any set value per animal or the overall cow-reduction target per sector. The internal Department of Agriculture documents indicate that the reduction is a long-term and not short-term option.

Given that Ireland’s funding under the next Common Agricultural Policy has already been outlined, it means that the scheme would likely have to be funded from the exchequer.

The average size of a suckler herd in Ireland is just 17 cows, meaning a farmer could expect to see a once-off €51,000 payment. Documents outline that farmers would be encouraged to grow grass for anaerobic digestion or plant forestry as a means of securing any future income from their land.

The average size of a dairy herd is 97 cows and given that dairy farming is almost five times more profitable than suckler farming, it is unlikely that as many dairy farmers will be interested in the scheme.

An Environmental Protection Agency briefing prepared for Government Ministers in July this year highlighted that: “Agriculture remains the single largest contributor to the overall emissions at 37.5 per cent of the total in 2021, with emissions from the sector increasing by 3 per cent to 23.10 Mt CO2 eq [million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent] in 2021.”

It specifically mentioned the ongoing increase in dairy cow numbers and use of chemical nitrogen as key factors in driving emissions.

This would not be the first retirement scheme in the history of Irish agriculture and the previous scheme that existed in the late 1990s was hugely popular with farmers, although the purpose of that scheme was to encourage the transfer of land from old to young farmers.

In England, an exit scheme has been introduced this year where farmers will be given up to £100,000 (€115,000) by their government if they agree to sell or rent their land, with the aim again being to encourage a generational shift in land ownership.