Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture and Food
Social Farming: Discussion
2:00 am
Ms Helen Doherty:
We engage fairly extensively with all the agriculture sector and have done from the very early days. We attend IFA meetings in various counties. Mr. McGreehan is very involved in the IFA. That is probably where he heard about it initially. However, we have a small team. We cannot be everywhere all the time but, for example, we were at the ploughing championships this year and we had huge interest in social farming, which was fantastic to see. Probably the strongest way of disseminating information about social farming and encouraging farmers to get involved, as Mr. McCrohan said, is one farmer speaking to another farmer. That word of mouth is really powerful and we try to bring that to the table as often as we can. We do not do any of those events without having our farmers there with us, alongside us. It is all very fine our talking about it but farmer input is invaluable. We work extensively with Macra, Teagasc and the IFA. They are all part of our network.
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