Pat Deering (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Members for their contributions today. It has been a very interesting and informative debate. We do not get the opportunity to discuss agriculture at length in this House very often, but I believe we should discuss it more often. If it had not been for the report, this debate would probably not have happened. In particular, I thank the members of the committee for the work they put into the report. When we came back after the recess last summer, we decided that there were a number of issues on our work programme that we wanted to deal with. The tillage sector was one of the issues because of the difficulties it had experienced in the previous year. I also thank the secretariat for its work, including Josie Briody and Ivan Farmer, and prior to him Kieran Tuohy, who did the leg work and spade work in terms of putting together the report.

The tillage sector needs to be saved. We could be negative about it. We have already lost the sugar beet industry, a fact which has been well articulated in this House. It would not take much for the tillage sector to go down the same road, which is why we need to take action. There are a number of recommendations in the report, but there is no silver bullet, and we never suggested there was. We did not publish this report so that it would lie on a shelf and gather dust. We want action to be taken as a result of it to ensure the tillage sector does not go down the same slippery road as the beet sector did in the past. The beet industry, as was pointed out by various speakers, should not have been allowed to disappear in the way it has. My own area, Carlow, has never recovered as a result of the sugar factory closing. It had a knock-on effect, not just for the farmers but for the town itself. People in Carlow town worked in the industry for whatever number of months they could, and that kept them going for the rest of the year. That has been lost, and we want to make sure that does not happen in the tillage sector.

There are approximately 7,000 tillage farmers left in the country. We received submissions when we were compiling the report, and Teagasc appeared before the committee. I remember asking it how many acres a tillage farmer needs to be sustainable going forward, and the answer was between 600 and 700 acres. That is a huge amount of land. We spoke about scale a few moments ago. How is a man who grew 30 or 40 acres in the past going to survive? He will not. The Minister spoke about the amount of leased and conacre land that is required for the tillage sector. That small farmer is now competing against a diary sector that is expanding at an enormous pace. I happened to be at a function yesterday in Kilkenny where there was a panel of young farmers who spoke about the amount of money they were prepared to pay for land. They were willing to pay €300 an acre as a starting point. The tillage farmer cannot compete.

We spoke about CAP and its importance. The Minister and Deputies Penrose and Martin Kenny all referenced it. Some 85% of a tillage farmer's income comes from direct payment. That is a huge problem. No matter how much one has, one is dependent on that cheque coming in in October, with the balance at Christmas, which will only serve to pay the bills from the previous year in many cases.

I would like to compliment the Irish Grain Growers Association, which took the lead immediately after we published the report. It organised a meeting of tillage farmers from the south east. It invited Michael Hoey from Country Crest, who has been the leader of a movement to get the sugar industry going again in Ireland. He is hugely ambitious and enthusiastic about it. He attended that particular meeting and made a very valuable contribution, in my opinion, outlining exactly what would be required. He said that it would be up to the farmers to come along and make an input to ensure that such a move would be possible in the future. I believe it is worth looking again in detail at the proposal from a number of years ago that the sugar industry be re-established in Ireland. A review was carried out by the previous agriculture committee, which Deputy Penrose was on about five or six years ago. Times have changed and we should take another detailed look at that review and establish whether it would be a viable prospect or, indeed, investigate what would be required to make it a viable prospect. It could add huge value to the tillage sector going forward.

One of the growth areas in the past number of years has been the growth of the local distilleries and local breweries. There are two in my constituency, namely, Hara's Brewery, which is a worldwide business at this stage, and Walsh's Whiskey Distillery, which invested €25 million in a new distillery in Carlow and is exporting to 45 or 50 different countries around the world. That is hugely beneficial to the local community, and it has to have a knock-on effect on corn and barley growing locally. That has to be supported going forward. The number of tillage farmers - 7,000, as I said - cannot be allowed to shrink any further. There have to be incentives built into tillage farming. It has to be attractive for the young farmer today who comes out of agricultural college to go home to a tillage farm. Tillage farmers have to work together with suckler and diary farmers. They can work hand in hand. The tillage sector is more seasonable, and there is a possibility for the tillage farmer to help out suckler and diary farms and potentially generate extra income.

This has been a worthwhile exercise and I would like to compliment all those who made contributions to the report. For the record, I thank the Irish Grain Growers Association, Irish Farmers Association, Teagasc, the Alcohol and Beverage Federation of Ireland, the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association, the Science Foundation of Ireland, Boortmalt and Minchmalt, which made submissions to the report and contributions to the hearings we had. I also thank the members of the committee who put a lot of work into the report. The committee works hard and does not normally get much recognition. The committees in general do a large amount of valuable work. This report can be a stepping stone for the future of the tillage sector. It was not put together so that it would gather dust on a shelf in the Department. I urge the Ministers to ensure that as many of the recommendations in this report as possible are implemented, and as soon as possible.

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