Tillage Sector
Dail Éireann — 2025-10-14
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Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

I completely agree with the Deputy. The truth is finance was found last year and has been found again for next year to support the tillage sector at a time of constrained budgets and a lot of competing demands on budgets. The farming for water European Innovation Partnership, EIP, of which tillage farmers are availing, has a budget of €60 million to support targeted on-farm additional measures to improve water quality, including establishment of cover crops, which we know have a really big impact as well. This year, over 1,400 tillage farmers have expressed an interest in establishing cover crops under the EIP.
The Food Vision tillage group was the subset of our Food Vision strategy. It had a stakeholder-led report. It is not my report or the Department's report; it is all the stakeholders together. That Food Vision group, chaired by Matt Dempsey, came up with a series of recommendations and they were not all about money. A lot of them were structural. That medium-term structural support for the future is exactly what the Food Vision tillage group looked at. I want to work with the sector to implement and address more of those structural challenges to get ourselves to step away from the dependency on world market prices and to try to get that value-added piece, on which I can expand more.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-10-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:04+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-10-14