Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I heard an interesting phrase at our church service in Geashill on Sunday morning, namely, "to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often". Who does not aspire to be perfect? The climate and biodiversity crises have plunged us into a significant time of change for every aspect of our lives. Some of us want to embrace this challenge and see the value in making changes in how we consume, travel and farm. Change requires us all to accept new information and different ways of doing things. It also requires us to recognise bad advice and bad practice and to be brave enough to call it out.

Irish agriculture has a massive challenge ahead, and while we are making progress in many ways, we still have some way to go. Productive farming of the future will be about more than just food production. It will require that food be produced in a way that improves water quality, restores biodiversity, cleans our air and reduces our emissions. Embracing system change is essential, because tinkering around the edges will not suffice. Indeed, how we use and manage our land has been subject to much debate, and this has certainly heated up in recent weeks with increased focus on the EU's nature restoration law. While the law itself is nowhere near complete and more work is needed on data and perhaps on how the emissions factors will be arrived at, it has, sadly, reopened the old fault lines of environmentalists versus farmers, with both camps back in their well-worn trenches and meaningful progress stalled yet again.

The part of my job I really love is getting out of the office, away from all that noise, out on the ground visiting farms throughout the country and meeting farmers who are doing things differently. I refer to farmers who are way ahead of the curve, whether that is through understanding what is real soil health and fertility, way beyond its chemical components and focusing on the very biological life within, or realising our relatively simplistic grass model is not resilient to the change in climate and that multispecies swards with a diversity of root depth and plant types enable pastures to thrive without the need for expensive fertiliser, or that minimal or zero-till arable systems work to save money and help protect vital soil biodiversity in a way many farmers would not believe until they saw it for themselves.

Doing nothing is not an option, yet some would be quite content to do just that. We know we are in trouble when mainstream farming publications see going organic as a threat, when farm organisations turn a blind eye to environmental destruction or when parliamentary parties take advice to scare consumers and farmers that being environmentally responsible will drive up the price of food and land. This sort of nonsense needs to be called out. We need less of the divisive exaggeration and scaremongering, and much more of a solutions-focused approach, examples of which we have throughout the country.