Coveney to maintain funding for Agricultural Catchments Programme

FUNDING has been expanded to cover a further four years of research into the Teagasc-led Agricultural Catchments Programme, an analysis of soil usage in six different study areas.

Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney announced the ongoing funding approval at Catchment Science 2011, a three-day international environment conference which continues today in the Mansion House, Dublin.

The conference is jointly hosted by Teagasc, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the British Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Scientists from the USA, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, England, Scotland, Wales, the North and the Czech Republic have been presenting papers for the past three days.

Mr Coveney said the ACP has been approved for a further four-year period from 2012 to 2015. He said this will allow a body of scientific evidence to continue to be built.

Mr Coveney said: “The Agricultural Catchments Programme was established by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in order to provide the necessary scientific evidence base to underpin Irish agricultural policy in the context of obligations under the EU Nitrates Directive and the EU Water Framework Directive.”

Teagasc director Prof Gerry Boyle welcomed the support of the minister and his department for the programme and the announcement that the project will continue to be funded to 2015.

He also welcomed the support for the role of research, saying that the Agricultural Catchments Programme dovetails with the ambitions of Food Harvest 2020, generating new knowledge to meet both the food production commitments and water quality targets.

In Ireland, the ACP was set up in 2008 in six agricultural catchments to look at the effectiveness of the measures in the National Action Programme established under the Nitrates Directive.

The programme is based on a partnership with farmers and other stakeholders and aims to support productive agriculture while protecting water quality.

Some early conclusions from the study were presented at the conference yesterday.

Regulating farm nutrient management through measures that minimise the risk of nutrient loss to water is fundamental to Ireland’s approach to maintaining water quality.

The six catchments represent a range of soils and landscapes used for intensive agriculture and were instrumented to observe interactions between regulations, nutrient losses and ecological status over one to three years.

To evaluate specific measures that focus on limiting nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to levels that minimise potential losses to water, detailed nutrient input, off-take, soil nutrient status, and crop and production type data were collected at farm and field level. These data allow calculations of nutrient requirements for optimum production on a farm.