Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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93. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the supports available in budget 2026 for the tillage sector; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [55463/25]

Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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The tillage sector is a vital part of the agrifood sector. A series of three consecutive poor harvests has severely impacted the viability of the tillage sector in Ireland. What supports are available in budget 2026 for the sector?

Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Cleere. He raises a valid point. The IFA called a meeting in the Killashee Hotel in Kildare, which was attended by over 1,000 tillage farmers. I addressed the meeting and answered questions in a very robust debate. We got through the issues, not just financial and short-term issues in terms of supporting the sector and maintaining confidence among farmers so that they will plough, do minimum tillage or put seed back in the ground again next year. There are medium-term interventions that can be taken in this space. I fully recognise the pressure there is on the tillage sector, not least the very challenging market outlook and the downward price pressure this season, off the back of two really tough years.

This Government recognises the importance of the tillage sector and wants to grow the area under tillage crops, but before we do that, we have to make sure we are not losing ground. This year, the amount of tillage has been stable compared to last year, but it is a third tough year for tillage farmers. We know if ground grows back from stubble into grass, it is unlikely to come back into tillage. That is why it is really important that we support the sector through this rough time.

In recognition of the sector’s importance, my Department will be supporting the tillage sector in 2026 with funding of at least €50 million through the protein aid scheme, the straw incorporation measure and a tillage support scheme. Having secured additional funding in budget 2026 for a tillage support scheme, I intend to consult stakeholders on its design and operation in due course.

The tillage sector will also be supported in 2026 through other schemes, including the tillage capital investment scheme, ACRES and the organic farming scheme, which I will be reopening for the tillage sector. In addition to commitments made in the budget, my Department has provided significant direct supports to tillage farmers in recent years. This year, the budget for the protein aid scheme was €10 million, having increased from €7 million to €10 million annually from last year. Applications for approximately 66,000 ha of cereals and oilseed rape straw were submitted under the straw incorporation measure this year. I committed to pay all eligible applicants, even though that was over the allocated money I had for the scheme. In February this year, I announced €32.4 million of payments under the tillage and horticulture support scheme. This was more than had been budgeted for, but I still met that commitment.

Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the €50 million additional funding and the commitment given today that a consultation process with key stakeholders will take place. When 1,000 farmers attend a meeting, it shows that there is a problem and a big challenge in the sector. We know the tillage sector contributes €1.3 billion annually to the Irish economy, but the sector is in decline, as the Minister outlined. The area under tillage farming in Ireland has reduced by 40% in 40 years. We are not tilling as much land as we were previously. The decline, as the Minister said, is a result of numerous pressures on the sector, including high input prices, competition for land and low global grain prices. Ireland now has one of the lowest percentages of land devoted to arable cropping among EU countries, at about 6.5% of the utilisable agricultural area. This is a huge challenge and a huge problem. I acknowledge and welcome the additional supports that are going to be put in place, but more needs to be done to future-proof this sector in the short, medium and longer term.

Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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I completely agree with the Deputy. The truth is finance was found last year and has been found again for next year to support the tillage sector at a time of constrained budgets and a lot of competing demands on budgets. The farming for water European Innovation Partnership, EIP, of which tillage farmers are availing, has a budget of €60 million to support targeted on-farm additional measures to improve water quality, including establishment of cover crops, which we know have a really big impact as well. This year, over 1,400 tillage farmers have expressed an interest in establishing cover crops under the EIP.

The Food Vision tillage group was the subset of our Food Vision strategy. It had a stakeholder-led report. It is not my report or the Department's report; it is all the stakeholders together. That Food Vision group, chaired by Matt Dempsey, came up with a series of recommendations and they were not all about money. A lot of them were structural. That medium-term structural support for the future is exactly what the Food Vision tillage group looked at. I want to work with the sector to implement and address more of those structural challenges to get ourselves to step away from the dependency on world market prices and to try to get that value-added piece, on which I can expand more.

Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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It was recently reported that the Department of agriculture intends to reopen the technical files on Irish whiskey. Currently, Irish whiskey is defined as a "spirit distilled on the island of Ireland ... from a mash of malted cereals, with or without whole grains of other cereals". By this definition, there is absolutely no requirement at the moment to use Irish grain in the production of Irish whiskey. Is the Minister able to confirm if the technical files will be reopened? If they are, would he be supportive of requiring Irish whiskey to be made with grain grown in Ireland? To me, this would seem an obvious way to support the struggling tillage sector.

Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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The whiskey file is one element that we can do as part of that future-proofing piece. In the meeting with the tillage farmers on the night in question I discussed the role of quality assurance, which we can make progress on if we all work together, and addressing the use of native grains, how they are used in our feed system, how they are incorporated and how we can monetise that for farmers. Teagasc will say that there is a lower emission profile using native grains as a feedstock for Irish beef. There is a story to tell there in terms of our emission profile of the beef produced from that feed. There is a piece we need to look at and identify how we monetise it to get a greater return for the produce so that the farmer benefits from using that if there is a higher cost to that input.

I have asked for the whiskey file to be re-examined. I have responsibility for the whiskey sector, which is under significant pressure. I am not coming to that with a specific viewpoint. There are pitfalls we have to be careful about here. If there was a year of a bad crop or crop failure here, we still have to be able to produce whiskey. It is about looking at that technical file to see how we can bring that value-added piece. That is the medium-term solution for supporting the tillage sector beyond one-off payments or financial direct schemes.