Hill farms focus shifts back to humans from vegetation
Vegetation was the priority in 1998, when complaints made to the European Commission about over-grazing led the Department of Agriculture to embark on a seven-year programme of destocking on about one million acres of hill farm land.
However, destocking seems to have escaped the control of department officials.
Not surprisingly, it took on a life of its own when the EU introduced decoupled payments, allowing farmers to get rid of even more of their unprofitable livestock, while retaining their full payments from the EU.
Next, the more attractive returns from off-farm employment during the Celtic Tiger era led many hill farmers to leave their flocks behind and find easier careers.
And in a country which has more farmers aged over 80 than under 35, many became too old for hill farming.
Destocking also became a runaway trend due to low prices for sheep.
Once numbering over 5m, our national sheep herd has shrunk to about 3.5m. Farmers were losing too much money when it came to sell their sheep.
Now, Department of Agriculture officials are heading for the hills again.
This time they are looking for farmers instead of wildlife or vegetation.
They are trying to turn the destocking tap off, because while they say overgrazing is still a problem in some areas, undergrazing is increasingly becoming a bigger problem.
They are looking for farmers to take flocks back onto the hills.
But like the last time, they are looking over their shoulders at Brussels.
Millions of euro of EU money are at stake, in the form of single farm payments paid from Brussels to Irish farmers.
Each year, about 4.7m hectares of eligible land are declared by Irish farmers for these payments, including €1.255bn of single farm payments, 100% from the EU.
More than 330,000 hectares of commonage upland is declared, representing 7% of the total — and Department of Agriculture officials fear that land abandonment will leave these commonages ineligible for payments.
Hill farmers once ran from the destocking official.
Now, the most feared visitor on the hills is the EU auditor.
If he finds some of the 330,000 hectares of commonage is not farmed according to what the EU calls “good agricultural and environmental conditions”, he effectively considers it abandoned, and it will no longer attract its share of the EU’s €1.255bn per year.
Civil servants have been racking their brains to solve the dilemma — caused in large part by what one senior Department official has cleverly described as the disappearance of two million lawn-mowers on the hills during the past few years — the two million sheep lost from the national flock.
So farmers are again the priority on the hills —because the only way to manage commonages is to graze them (although selective burning of land where there has been excessive build-up of vegetation is not ruled out by officials).
The officials are coming back again with grazing plans for commonages, just like they did in the destocking drive about 10 years ago.
But farmers can play hard-to-get this time around.
Officials promise their new grazing plans will not be railroaded through, they want dialogue and communication with farmers this time, as they try to encourage and incentivise them to go back to the hills and the commonages.
Farmers should respond to this softly-softly approach by holding out for something like the Burren Farming for Conservation Programme.
On the limestone-landscape region in northwest Co Clare, nearly 160 farmers, on 14,639 hectares, earn €81 per hectare on average for taking part in this programme.
They remove scrub, repair stone walls, provide access tracks, install livestock watering and feeding facilities, and produce species-rich grassland, while tending their herds and flocks.
Nothing less than a similar scheme is needed to make the hard life of an upland farmer worthwhile, if he has to protect biodiversity such as the red grouse and hen harrier, and safeguard his environment in a high nature value type of farming.
