Despite 2025 being a challenging year for Irish tillage farmers, Signpost Programme Tillage Farmer, Tom Tierney reflects on some of the positives.

Sometimes a great way to start the New Year is to look back on the farming successes you had from the previous year and try to build on them. With Irish cereal farming currently in the doldrums such highs scarcely come to mind.

However, one big highlight came my way in September when I won the ‘Enhancing Biodiversity’ category at the Teagasc/FBD Environmental Sustainability Awards 2025 ceremony. It was nice to be recognised for farming with nature and creating a space for nature on my farm. I take great pride in my many years of work improving biodiversity and soil health while maintaining a productive tillage enterprise and hope it may inspire others to do the same.

Cover crops

Another farming achievement was the doubling of area sown to cover crops from 20 hectares in previous years to 37 hectares in 2025. This was achieved through the Farming for Water EIP, summer cover crop option. Effectively the EIP summer cover payment goes towards those seeds & crop establishment costs but the hidden benefits for soil health long outlast the surplus euros.

I opted to sow a mix of mustard and vetch, vetch for the legume advantage of fixing free nitrogen in the soil, and the mustard for its fast-growing ability to produce biomass and soil cover within the short cropping window of just two months before drilling the 2026 winter wheat cash crop.

It was an excellent growing season for cover crops nationwide and some farmers were finding difficultly dealing with the level of biomass they had to contend with ahead of ploughing.

Direct drilling

Being a direct drill fanatic, I drilled my winter wheat crop into the standing 4ft green crop with the Duncan DD30 drill behind the tractor with a crimper roller on the front linkage. The crimper roller was a farm workshop build, with the aim of pushing the crop to the floor in the direction of drill travel, clearing a drilling pathway and crushing the stems multiple times to terminate them.

However, in our Maritime climate this doesn’t always work as well as you’d hope, and glyphosate is almost always required as an immediate follow up solution to terminate the cover crop growth.

The wheat plants hidden beneath the now decaying cover crop at present look great and are well protected from the elements and pests.

Carbon footprint

AgNav’s tillage version, giving results on the carbon footprint of Irish crops, was launched late last year, so after a little persuasion and help from my advisor John we sat down recently and inputted my field and harvest data to find some surprising results.

Winter oats, the homeless crop, was the outright winner and had the lowest carbon footprint at 117kg CO₂ eq/t and was carbon neutral (-65kg CO₂ eq/t) when straw chopping was included. My malt barley had the highest figure of all the farms crops at 274kg CO₂ eq/t. To put these in context, I’m told that Irish cereals are generally around 200 – 250 kg CO₂/t which is substantially lower than many of our competing imports coming in from around the world. The driving factor for the malt barleys disappointing result was the low yield we found. Had it been grown as feed barley and received more nitrogen and yielded better would the carbon footprint have been better too? Perhaps? At least now we have a new tool where we can monitor and track these differences.

Will carbon footprinting our home-grown grains ever add any euro value to the grain price for Irish grain growers? I don’t know but it definitely highlights the value of food sovereignty which is something our European paymasters and others have forgotten.

Using low carbon footprint Irish grain together with native grain minimum inclusion in feed rations needs to be prioritised to restore a viable home-grown market.

AgNav potentially highlights your farms future sustainability so while we wait patiently for spring field work to begin, spend some time inputting last year’s data & determine your farms sustainable pathway.

Tom Tierney is a Signpost Tillage Farmer working closely with Signpost Tillage Advisor John Mahon and Teagasc Tillage Advisor, John Brophy.

The above article first appeared in the Farming Independent.

For more from the Teagasc Signpost Programme, visit here.

Find out more and submit your entry to the Teagasc FBD Environmental Sustainability Awards here.