Mr. Denis Duggan:

We have submitted proposals to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and at Commission level, to support a land mobility service. For members of the committee who are not familiar with it, it is, in essence, a matchmaking service that deals predominantly with putting together older farmers and young farmers outside of a family relationship to instigate shared farming partnerships, leases or other types of collaborative arrangements to support generational renewal. Since the foundation of the service in 2012 and 2013, it has put together more than 700 such partnerships with, on average, 140 arrangements per year.

In 2012, before the service started, Dr. Pat Bogue, who is familiar to some committee members from various research he has undertaken in agriculture, did a survey in which he found that 48% of full-time farmers did not have an identified successor. The Irish Farm Accounts Co-operative, IFAC, which is the farm accountancy firm, did a farm survey report in 2021 which found 77% of farmers over the age of 55 had no definite succession plan. It is not necessarily that the farmers in either report had no heir, that they were bachelor farmers or any such scenario. Many had sons and daughters but they were in professional careers, scattered to the four corners of the world or not yet ready to take on the family farm enterprise. It is something they might want to do in ten or 15 years time but there may be a desire for mum or dad to step back from farming before the next generation is ready. This is where the Land Mobility Service has stepped in. We have been seeking to have the service scaled up and supported under the next CAP. We have made detailed submissions to the Department on that basis.