Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)

We have so many supports available for our farmers, who are up for this challenge, as I said earlier. I am accompanied by the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, who has a budget of €1.3 billion underpinning the forestry programme 2023-2027, which is the means by which we are implementing the forestry strategy and supporting farmers and the industry to reduce emissions through carbon capture, which Deputy Heneghan outlined in many different ways. It is really important. My Department supports a range of other climate change mitigation activities, including improvement in bovine genetics, which has a massive potential in terms of the scalability and the cumulative benefit year on year, investments in solar panels on farms, support for multi-species swards, and many other measures.

I have always said farmers cannot go green environmentally if they are in the red financially, but the truth is that the smart business play, not just the right thing to do by our environment, for our farmers is adopting more of these sustainability measures, once we make sure that sustainability stool is equally divided between the economic, the environmental and the societal. We are definitely making great strides in that space and farmers are doing their bit.

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