Dr. Rogier Schulte:

I thank the Chairman and members for this opportunity to present to the committee.

It is timely to discuss emerging demands on land use. Changing land use is a slow process, not only in Ireland but internationally, that requires early engagement because it is difficult to manage. The time horizon is between 2020 and 2050. The European Commission is preparing a land use directive aimed at dealing with the challenges we will be discussing today. We would like Ireland to be in a position to inform this process rather than respond to it in ten years' time. Our work is based on numerous reports and scientific papers but this presentation will be a whistle-stop tour.

At global level there are two grand challenges facing agriculture, namely, achieving and maintaining food security and sustainability. By 2050, the world population will have risen to 9 billion. Particularly in emerging countries, there is an increase in demand for livestock produce. The demand for food is expected to go up by 60% by 2015. With sustainability, there is the impact of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change on agriculture. Globally, agriculture is the largest consumer of fresh water. There is also pressure on biodiversity. Wherever agricultural areas expand, it commonly comes at the expense of biodiversity such as with the Amazon rain forests or high nature value farmlands in Europe.

The question we are facing is how we can maximise multi-functionality of our limited land resources. Ireland is no different in this respect and can be considered a microcosm of these global challenges. Food Harvest 2020 is an agricultural policy in response to food security concerns. We also have a raft of environmental policies coming from Brussels and national level.

What do we expect from our land? There are five high level demands on land use, namely, the provision of food, fibre and fuel, water purification, to sequester carbon to offset greenhouse gas emissions, to provide a habitat for biodiversity and a home for nutrients in the form of cow or pig slurry or sewage sludge from human waste. Over the past five years, Teagasc has conducted a scoping study on the extent to which we are likely to meet all these demands. Over the short term, up to 2020, there is a real potential to meet these competing demands for land but only if the process is managed from the very start. That was also the conclusion of the independent environmental analysis of Food Harvest 2020, published by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in the past fortnight.

How can we achieve the targets set out in Food Harvest 2020? It can be done through intensification, keeping more animals on the same intensively farmed land base to achieve more output.

Alternatively, the same targets can be reached through expanding the land area intensively farmed and increasing the total number of animals but not the average stocking rate. The third pathway is what we call resource efficiency where we produce more from the same amount of input and the same number of animals. In reality, we expect that Food Harvest will achieved through a combination of all three pathways.
What are the implications for land use categories and land use change? We are not going into the detail of these figures here. These are historical figures from the CSO on the broad land use categories and our projections to 2020. The bottom line is that our projection is that Food Harvest 2020 per sewill have limited impact on the broad land use categories in Ireland. The caveat is that within grassland, we expect an expansion of the intensively managed grasslands at the expense of the extensively managed grassland, mainly through new drainage schemes.
The second demand we are facing relates to greenhouse gases and climate change. This is where we expect our land to sequester carbon. The context of this debate is that, as we now know, it is extremely difficult to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions per seand that it is a simply a reflection of our ruminant dominated livestock industry. It is very difficult to reduce methane emissions from ruminant animals. At best, we can aspire to flat line our agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in the context of achieving the Food Harvest 2020 objectives. Half of that story is good news because it means a decoupling of production and emissions. Within the current Kyoto framework, we are stuck with reducing agricultural emissions.
Post-Kyoto, new thinking is emerging to allow agriculture to take credit for the good things it does in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly sequestering carbon in the soil and displacing fossil fuel emissions or imports through bio-energy and biofuel crops. We have carried out an assessment of the potential of this off-setting and currently our grasslands are sequestering carbon at a high rate. Our first generation forestry is also sequestering carbon. Our arable lands are considered neutral whereas our drained organic soils are a source of carbon emissions.
We also assessed the future potential. We may or may not be able to increase our grassland sequestration. It will be difficult because the rates are already so high. There is real potential to expand our first generation forestry area and hence increase carbon sequestration. There is also real potential for bio-energy crops as a sink for carbon. In December, we published a comprehensive report about it that is available on our website. The overall conclusion is that there is real potential for agricultural off-setting of greenhouse gas emissions but this will require land use change, forestry and bio-energy. Before that becomes a reality, there are many obstacles. These obstacles are regulatory, social and economic, particularly in respect of bio-energy. There is real potential here for competition with both food production and biodiversity objectives.
A third demand we ask of our land is the provision of clean water. Here we are led by the EU water framework directive, which is a very complex directive, but, ultimately, it comes down to two objectives. The first is to achieve good water quality status for all water bodies across the EU. If we have a quick look at how Ireland is faring - there is a slide with the 17 original EU member states with Ireland highlighted - we can see that the directive ultimately requires that all the bars are either green or blue. At the moment, Ireland is not in a bad starting position. It is in fourth place in the EU in terms of the amount of water we consider to be of good quality. From our agricultural catchments programme, we know that the nitrates action plan that has been in place for the past ten years will go a long way towards achieving good water quality status. One important caveat is that this is a very slow process. Our farmers have implemented many measures to protect water quality under the nitrates directive but it may take many years - ten or 20 years - before this translates into good water quality. This simply due to legacy effects in our soils.
The second objective of the water framework directive is more challenging. Wherever there is pristine water quality, this must be maintained. This is better than good water quality. Of particular relevance in Ireland are the freshwater pearl mussel and the catchments in which this shellfish is found. It is a very rare shellfish that is threatened with extinction across the EU and worldwide. These are the water bodies where we require pristine water quality to be maintained. Our overall conclusion here is that additional actions may be required to maintain these pristine water bodies. One caveat is that any actions must be assessed for cost-effectiveness. Often one can get the same result for an order of magnitude difference in the cost. In other words, some actions are very cost-effective and cheap while others can be very expensive.
This leads us neatly to our last demand, which is to provide a habitat for biodiversity. Here we are led by the EU habitats directive and the birds directive which have led to the designation of Natura 2000 sites across Ireland in which biodiversity is prioritised. That is the good news. The bad news is that according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service survey, the outlook for many of these habitats is either bad or poor. There are also concerns about high nature value farmland outside these areas. This has culminated in a negative judgement against Ireland by the European Court of Auditors, which has been well documented. Our conclusion is that additional action may be required to maintain the rich natural heritage of our landscape but, again, any actions must be assessed for cost-effectiveness.
This leads to the question of how we can manage these competing demands for land. We have a limited land base. How can we manage that? We know from our work that all our soils perform all functions in response to these demands but some soils perform some functions better than others. Some soils are better than others at producing agricultural output and some soils are better than others at purifying water. A solution could lie in the targeted management of our three scenarios - roll out resource efficiency where this is cost-effective. Intensification may be justified and desirable where we have the soils that can process the additional nutrient loads. Expansion may be the preferred option where this competes with high nature value farmland.
The next logical question is how this can be managed. A particular challenge we are facing is that it is often assumed this can only be managed through command and control or red lining areas for agriculture, sequestration or forestry, but this is not necessarily the case because it can also be managed through what we call soft incentivisation. Indeed, the EU, including Ireland, has a very long history and tradition of managing land use through schemes like the Common Agricultural Policy; the less favourable areas, LFAs; agri-environmental schemes; and the forestry scheme. There is no reason this could not also be applied to manage land use in a future context.
How is Teagasc addressing these issues? It is fair to say that most of our research, knowledge transfer and education programmes have focused on the resource efficiency scenario - getting more value and more output out of the same amount of input and land base. Examples are the carbon navigator, the grass wedge and the economic breeding index. We have a new programme called a soil quality assessment and research programme, which is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, where we will quantify these five soil functions for more than 150 farms throughout the country. Another new development is our new sustainability demonstration farm, which we launched in October 2013 in Kildalton, where we will bring together all our knowledge in education, research and knowledge transfer on this resource efficiency. We also engage with policy. Our submissions to the review of the nitrates action plan, the climate policy and the development of the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, are well documented. We are also engaging at EU level. We have worked with the Commission on the bio-physical criteria of the new LFAs and are now leading a proposal under Horizon 2020 called LANDMARK which is aimed at informing the new EU land use directive.
The final point that may be of note to the committee is that, this year, Teagasc will launch the Irish soil information system, ISIS.

It is a five and a half year collaboration between Teagasc and the Environmental Protection Agency which produced the new high resolution soil map of Ireland. All of our soil information will be publicly and freely available on the web. The scale will be 1:250,000 which makes it applicable for use at national and regional level. It is not applicable at field or farm level.
We have two headline conclusions: in the short term it looks like there is an opportunity to manage our land resources to meet all targets but only if we manage them from the start. After 2020, however, hard choices on our land use may be required. These might even be choices between sustainability indicators and we might face questions such as do we want to offset our agricultural or greenhouse gas emissions, for example, through forestry. This may come at the expense of biodiversity, or vice versa, do we want to protect all biodiversity which will reduce the opportunity for carbon offsetting? Then we have to throw in the other demands, food production and water quality and we may be faced with very difficult choices. The one thing that is clear is that we can no longer address these challenges one at a time. We cannot deal with water quality this week and greenhouse gases next week. It requires a coherent response. This is a good opportunity for engagement, as we have started, but it is a slow process. We have heard the first discussions on a successor to Food Harvest 2020, named Food Harvest 2025. That may be a good opportunity to start thinking about these competing demands for land use to bring it into the process. This is a timely moment to engage with the EU process. We would like Ireland to be in a position to inform that process, rather than in ten years time having to respond to its outcome.
I thank the committee for its time. We will welcome whatever questions members may have.