Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will do it by growing more domestically and trying to take steps that will improve that. We have great capacity to do tillage well and produce grain productively. Currently, we import approximately two thirds of our total feed requirement for human and animal feed purposes. Over the past ten or 15 years, we have seen a decline as well in our tillage sector in the area under tillage. We want to reverse that. Last year, particularly after the invasion of Ukraine and the uncertainty around supply chains, I introduced the tillage support scheme, which paid €400 a hectare for each new additional hectare of tillage that was done in 2022. That led to the most significant jump we have seen for many years - almost a 7% increase in area under tillage. That is in place again now for this year. One of our targets in the climate action plan is to grow the area under tillage. It makes sense from a number of fronts to put in place-----