Reducing Ireland’s beef herd makes more sense than a huge reduction in profitable dairy cattle
As agriculture accounts for around 40 per cent of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, reducing them has to be an important plank in the Government’s climate plan. The target of cutting these emissions by a quarter by 2030 will be challenging, but this still makes reaching the goal of halving overall emissions by 2030 a big stretch. So the pace of action will need to pick up after 2030.
Some reduction in the size of the national herd would help lower methane emissions, but reducing the beef herd makes more sense than a huge reduction in the profitable dairy herd.Germany has a problem with a rigid constitutional rule that narrowly limits the permissible budget deficit Fertiliser use is the big source of long-lived pollution from farming. Alongside its emissions of long-lived nitrous oxide, fertiliser use is the chief culprit in contamination of our waterways, as well as its role in reducing biodiversity. That’s why the top priority in agri-environmental policy should be to substantially reduce fertiliser inputs over the period to 2030.