Macra seeks EU realism in greening
A member of a Macra na Feirme group at a meeting of European young farmers in Cologne, Germany, Mr O’Regan is urging young farmers to make submissions on europa.eu as part of the EU’s greening consultation process.
The delegation was led by Macra president Seán Finan. Macra is urging the EU Commission to heed the experience of farmers, and to avoid imposing “one size fits all” rules on farm land use.
Mr O’Regan said: “Introducing the option of developing a good crop rotation plan specific to farms would be far more effective in many circumstances than a rigid three-crop rule. Collaborative tillage arrangements such as share farming are most affected by burdensome greening bureaucracy.
“Farmers with a number of farming arrangements to grow crops travel distances to till, sow, apply protection and nutrients and harvesting three different crops at different times for each farming arrangement; this is impractical, inefficient and is not necessarily achieving its greening objective.”
Macra believes a ‘whole farming’ approach for the active farmer in collective farming arrangements would be far more effective from an environmental perspective.
