Climate Adaptation: The Bigger Picture for the Irish outdoor vegetable sector
The Irish field vegetable sector faces a significant challenge managing increases in risk and costs posed by climate change.
Within the publication ‘The 2026 Drought and its Aftermath: Impact and Recovery in the Irish Outdoor Vegetable Sector’, the Teagasc Horticulture Development Department examined actions to close the resilience gap and increase preparedness for the sector:
Climate change is impacting food and water security throughout Europe as well as international fresh produce supply chains.
The 2026 drought did not occur in isolation. It follows the hottest summer on record in 2025 (Ireland’s second record-hot summer in successive years) and sits within a run of drought-affected years (2018, 2020, 2022, 2024) that have progressively tested the water resilience of Irish farming.
Drought is also only one part of a wider pattern: growers are seeing more frequent, intense extreme weather in several forms, including heavy rainfall, saturated soils and flooding, heatwaves, and storms, with Irish climate projections pointing to summers becoming drier even as autumns and winters grow wetter.
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s Sectoral Adaptation Plan 2025 confirms this trajectory, projecting more prevalent summer drought and more days above 25°C nationally under a higher-emissions pathway, with the sharpest increases falling on the south-east, the heart of Ireland’s vegetable crop production.
Although Ireland has one of the highest rates of water availability in Europe, water supplies can be under pressure when crop water demands are at a peak during the driest months especially in the drier catchment areas. This is where the sector’s “heavy lifting” now lies.
Many growers invested in additional irrigation capacity after the 2018 drought, but that investment was reasonably sized for a fortnight or three weeks of top-up irrigation on part of a farm’s cropped area, not for the near-continuous, whole-farm demand created by a drought like 2026, where the moisture deficit sat across almost the entire growing area at once.
The mismatch is one of scale, not effort, and it has already been outgrown by the scale of the risk. The national Sectoral Adaptation Plan is a valuable framework, but it is not yet granular to field vegetable production, and this report does not attempt to resolve that on its own.
What this year’s experience does offer is a starting point for that conversation between growers, industry, researchers and policymakers, built around a small number of questions any field-vegetable-specific strategy will eventually need to answer, and read alongside Ireland’s National Adaptation Framework (2024) and DAFM’s Sectoral Adaptation Plan (2025) rather than as a substitute for them:
Evidence and data: what a proper farm-level picture of irrigation and water-management capacity would look like, and how catchment-level intelligence on different irrigation systems, water demand, availability and abstraction pressure could be improved to target future investment.
Investment pathways: whether water storage, irrigation and crop storage infrastructure are appropriately prioritised and whether current supports are matched to the scale of the challenge now emerging.
Soil health and land management: how the resilience this season’s better-buffered soils demonstrated, more organic matter, better structure, land recently out of ley, could be built more deliberately into future support and advice.
Catchment-level collaboration: how growers, water authorities, local government and research bodies might plan storage, abstraction and shared infrastructure together, rather than farm by farm, and what funding routes, such as EIP-AGRI and the DAFM Thematic Research Call, could support that shift.
Longer-term genetic resilience: what role plant breeding and newer genomic techniques could play in developing varieties better suited to drought and heat stress, as one part of a longer-term resilience toolkit alongside infrastructure and water management.
None of this is a finished answer. It is a starting list, and the sector’s task now is to work through it together.
2026 was not an anomaly. It was a rehearsal, and not just for Ireland. The same summer saw more than 70% of England officially in drought, its driest July since records began in 1836, and water-use restrictions affecting an estimated 29 million people across English water company areas; France reported vegetable losses of up to 100% on some unirrigated cauliflower, broccoli and lettuce crops.
Ireland’s food system leans on exactly these regions to fill gaps when domestic supply is under pressure, and that backstop cannot be assumed to hold as climate change intensifies. This is no longer a question of domestic production resilience alone. It is a supply chain and food security question, and every actor in that chain, growers, retailers, consolidators, policymakers and researchers, now has direct evidence of what happens when water becomes the binding constraint. On an annual basis, Ireland has a plentiful supply of water; the deficit is in the infrastructure to manage it seasonally in line with crop demand. The work of closing that gap must start now, while the evidence is fresh, because the next event of this scale is no longer a risk to plan for. It is a certainty to prepare for.
The above was adapted for use on Teagasc Daily from the publication: The 2026 Drought and Its Aftermath: Impact and Recovery in the Irish Outdoor Vegetable Sector, prepared by Dermot Callaghan, Eoin Sweetman, Andy Whelton and William Deasy, Teagasc Horticulture Development Department.