Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 27 February 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Farm Foresty Partnership Agreements: Discussion

3:30 pm

Mr. Gerard Murphy:

People have said the earlier schemes were not attractive. If I were looking at it, the earlier schemes are probably more attractive because they provided a guaranteed, index-linked payment right the way through. If one looks at the time-dimension money, it is a guarantee of payments all the way through to the end. Some of those schemes are attractive to the farmer. It depends on one's appetite for risk. Some people preferred a guaranteed income and did not want to worry about the performance of the crop. They were happy to take that. In other cases, partners started to say they wanted to be more vested in how the value was created and they wanted to capture some of the value at the end if log prices changed in the long-term. It depended on the appetite for risk among the partners.