Mr. Tadhg Buckley:

I thank the president and I thank the committee for the invitation to attend this afternoon. Most things have been covered. On the red map, what the president has just said is very important. What the red map has shown is that what was requested by the Commission is actually the core problem. The EPA did what the Commission asked it to do. To be fair, this is something we have flagged with regard to this Commission implementing decision since we first became aware of it last June.

There are a couple of issues that are important to consider. Obviously, timing and the putting in of additional measures are very important. These were covered earlier. The bluntness in the approach of reducing the 250 kg per hectare to 220 kg per hectare is likely to result in the loss of the goodwill of farmers. It is also misses an opportunity. As Mr. Herlihy has said, we are fortunate that our water quality levels are of a high standard when compared to our EU counterparts. There are targets set out in the likes of the water framework directive which mean that we will need to protect our water quality and look at making improvements. We fully understand that. However, if you want to make improvements, you need to take the measures that will achieve that. We are of the view that it cannot categorically be said that going from 250 kg per hectare to 220 kg per hectare will achieve any significant improvement in water quality. There are alternative options that the sector could look at that could well achieve significantly better results. When you look at trying to put measures in place, if you go straight to 220 kg per hectare, I am not sure you will keep the goodwill of farmers. They have already taken significant additional measures over recent years. We spoke about banding and a 10% reduction in organic nitrogen was adopted by the industry. We have also looked at other things like cambering roadways and soil water storage. We need to look at what we can do. The agricultural sustainability support and advisory programme, ASSAP, which involves doing the right measure in the right place at the right time, takes a much more tailored approach. That will likely achieve better results.

Let us look at what the move to 200 kg could potentially do. It could lead to a significant overheating of an already disrupted land market. Over the last 12 months, we have seen a great increase in the demand for land which has led to a substantial increase in the cost of leasing land. That has impacted all farmers. There are a couple of ways it has impacted farmers.

First of all, the economically stronger farmers can outcompete the less economically strong farmers. In other words, we have dairy farmers who economically, based on income per hectare, have a stronger capacity to pay for a hectare of land and can outcompete non-dairy farmers. As well as that, we have smaller dairy farmers, which are the core of our industry, struggling to hold on to or acquire land because they are being outcompeted by larger dairy farmers. There are, therefore, unintended consequences and possibly situations whereby smaller dairy farmers and non-dairy farmers are unable to get land, or where they are renewing land leases are paying substantially more for them. That is a direct income hit as well. It is a transfer of funds from active and productive farmers in drystock tillage and dairy across to landowners for whom, in many cases, that money does not work and does not make anything like the same economic contribution nationally. We have seen that already and it is going to keep happening.

I will make one more point if the Chair does not mind. The other issue is that if we look at our climate action plan targets, a core part of that is land use. If we look at the 2023 climate action plan, there are significant targets set out. We have an ambition to have an additional 68,500 ha under forestry by 2030. If we are to achieve our anaerobic digestion target, we estimate that it will require another 115,000 ha of land. We have an ambition, which we think is the right thing to have, to try to increase our area under tillage. We want to look at increasing that by 51,500 ha. The Government has no chance of achieving those targets if it is making changes to the nitrates programme. We estimate that a 250 kg N/ha to 220 kg N/ha reduction will lead to an extra 29,000 ha of land being required by dairy farmers.

The issue is that when we look at how we are going about this, it has a significant number of additional unintended consequences we have to factor in. That is why we need to look at this in a different way to ask what we can do as alternatives that can still look to achieving the ambition of protecting and possibly enhancing water quality without having a substantial income hit directly to the farmers in derogation and indirectly to other farmers who are farming across the country.