16 May 2024

More organic tillage needed

An upsurge in the number of organic livestock farms has created an opportunity for the Irish organic tillage sector to expand.

As part of a recent Signpost Series Webinar, Senior Inspector at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s organic division, Jack Nolan provided insights into organic farming in Ireland to which approximately 225,000ha or 5% of the available agricultural area is now under.

In 2023, there were approximately 4,000 organic farmers in Ireland, Nolan explained. The vast majority of these carried livestock systems, while just 409 grew cereals and only 56 of the latter were tillage only farms. An additional 1,000 farmers entered the Organic Farming Scheme (OFS) this year, bringing the total to over 5,000 farms, something Nolan noted as a positive before highlighting how those participating in the OFS are dispersed across the country.

 “From the start, it (organics) has been mainly taken up by farmers in the west. A lot of farmers who have been close to organic have come in and we have seen tremendous growth there. It’s about two-thirds to the west and one-third to east. We really need more farmers to come in in the east of the country for a number of reasons,” Nolan said.

Such reasons include the west-to-east trading of livestock, particularly stores, but also the increased suitability of land in the east for tillage production.

“We also need more tillage. We need more native grain produced. Now this is true for conventional as well as organic, but for the coming winter, we are going to import about 30,000t of organic feed into Ireland.

“The department carried out a survey of organic farmers over Christmas and it showed that 50,000t of meal or concentrates will be fed next winter. That can be straights like barley or oats, it can be combi crops like peas and barley, but also people are buying nuts that are coming in from abroad,” he said, before adding: “We want to produce as much of that as possible here. There is a great opportunity for Irish tillage farmers here to switch into organic and meet this growing demand.”

For more insights from Jack Nolan’s presentation, a recording of the Signpost Series webinar is available to view below:

Further information on organic farming is also available on the Teagasc Organics webpage.

Find out more about the Teagasc Signpost Series here.

Also read: The farm-to-farm trading of organic feed regulations