The drought conditions caused by the prolonged dry spell this summer show the need for the Irish horticulture industry to consider adopting irrigation systems more widely, Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon has said.
Heydon on Tuesday said horticulture farms which did not have irrigation systems were very constrained during crucial growth periods this summer.
“Only 20 per cent of our potato crop had irrigation, and it performed much better than that which didn’t,” he said.
Heydon said he and Minister of State Niall Collins had changed the requirements of a capital investment scheme for horticulture to make it easier to apply for support for irrigation systems.
“The horticulture sector is an area that we need to protect. It is vulnerable and under pressure.”
He said all sectors in agriculture needed to build up resilience so farming could be future-proofed against extreme weather events, which he predicted would be less rare in the years ahead.
Heydon was speaking at a press conference following an informal meeting of EU agriculture ministers in Dublin Castle held as part of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. He was accompanied by Christophe Hansen, EU commissioner for agriculture.
Hansen described the drought across Europe this summer as a catastrophe. Record temperatures were recorded in some countries as the Continent experienced many weeks of high heat and no precipitation.
He said he had been meeting farmers and representatives from across the EU to get a better understanding of the impact on the sector.
“The economic losses will be significant for sure. Although we don’t know yet the entire dimension of the catastrophe, there is also a human side and a dimension that we should not forget.”
Hansen, who is from Luxembourg, said a farmer in France told him he had to cope with temperatures of 48 degrees inside his greenhouses. He said the farmer had to work under those conditions to save his crop.
He said such extremes had put huge mental and physical pressures on farmers.
“In other places we had different situations where water needed to be brought to mountain regions. They usually always have access to fresh waters, but the rivers were just going dry.”
The commissioner said the Common Agricultural Policy had flexibility and that some payments could be made earlier to provide liquidity to farmers. He said there were also some derogations available to address what he called a natural disaster.
Regarding methane emissions in the livestock sector, Heydon told the conference the change from monoculture ryegrass to a multi-species sward in Irish grasslands had helped lock nitrogen into the soil and reduce emissions, as well as lessened farmers’ dependency on artificial fertilisers.
He also said that the use of better genetics in livestock had seen animals emitting 23 per cent less methane, while having a 4 per cent greater carcass weight.