Gearóid Maher, a fifth-generation Irish dairy farmer, stands in what looks like a field of weeds. He has planted the chicory, plantain, brassica, kale leaves and clover deliberately, to reduce his farm’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet he feels dairy farmers like him are being unfairly blamed as Ireland struggles to a make a dent in its ambitious climate targets.
Ireland’s cows — which belch out methane, the gas responsible for more than a quarter of global warming — are the country’s worst climate offender.
That has prompted the government to float proposals to cull almost 200,000 dairy cows over the next three years. The island has 7.1mn cattle, of which 1.6mn are being used for dairy.
The drastic prospect was seen as a way to help achieve a tough 25 per cent cut in agricultural emissions by 2030. Ireland had by far the largest rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the EU in the last quarter of 2022 compared with the same period in 2021, and has the worst methane emissions per capita in the bloc.
Maher’s multi-species fields are one of the ways he is slashing emissions on his 210-acre farm in Cappamore in County Limerick in south-west Ireland. He has also halved the use of nitrogen fertilisers and cut out pesticides.
“There’s no chemical sprays or fertilisers. This is ready for grazing,” he says.
Farming makes up almost 40 per cent of all emissions on an island famous for its grass-fed dairy and beef. The Irish government has set a target of reducing the nation’s overall emissions by 51 per cent by the end of the decade, en route to its goal of net zero by 2050.
Progress is painfully slow. Overall carbon emissions in Ireland fell just 1.9 per cent last year, according to the country’s independent Environmental Protection Agency. Farming managed a cut of only 1.2 per cent, although that was a swing from 2021, when agricultural emissions rose 3.6 per cent.
The Climate Change Advisory Council, another independent body, warned last month that Ireland stood no chance of hitting its overall targets “unless urgent action is taken immediately”.
Dairy farmer Maher holding a leaf of plantain. His herd eat multi-species grasses, reducing the use of nitrate fertilisers © Robert Stothard/FT
Dairy farmers — who have increased herd numbers by 38 per cent in the past decade, according to the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation — feel they are being blamed.
“It’s almost like there’s a bull’s eye on our backs,” said Maher, 38, who has 110 cows. “The media portray us as climate killers and climate deniers. We are the first to see climate change. We are doing our bit to change things.”
Climate activists, who say Irish farming is “unsustainable”, last year marched on Ireland’s Dáil parliament with a banner reading “meat + dairy = climate crisis”.
Cows are a constant of the pastoral landscape on a lush island where archaeological remains show dairying has been carried out for 6,000 years.
The dairy industry is worth €13.1bn a year to the Irish economy, supports 54,000 jobs and brought in a record €6.8bn in exports in 2022.
“This is Ireland’s biggest native industry, full stop,” said Conor Mulvihill, director of Dairy Industry Ireland, which represents producers, manufacturers and specialised nutrition firms. Ireland has 18,000 dairy farmers, many of them in small rural co-operatives.
Reducing methane emissions from cattle and dairy farming
A cull of 200,000 dairy cows would be “the same as saying you’re going to have to take 1mn cars off the road”, he said.
The drastic plan was laid out in a government document obtained by the Irish Independent newspaper in late May under a Freedom of Information request. It has not yet been approved or made public policy.
Not only would it hammer a hugely profitable industry that supplies 130 markets and that Ireland maintains is very efficient in emissions terms, Mulvihill said it would also risk more of the world’s milk, butter and cheese coming from countries with worse green credentials than Ireland.
If anyone had to cut their herd numbers, though, it should be dairy producers, argued Tony Tuohy, a former dairy farmer-turned-beef producer who keeps 90 heifers on his farm in Dromkeen, County Limerick.
Beef herds have already contracted by almost a quarter in the past decade, according to the ICBF, and Tuohy said beef farmers “barely make enough to get by”. Dairy, however, is far more profitable and herd sizes have ballooned since 2015, when EU quotas — introduced in 1984 to end surpluses that led to butter mountains and milk lakes — were scrapped. “That blew the dam away. It left everyone producing what they liked and let the herd get too big,” Tuohy said.
Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc) said in its latest emissions mitigation report that targets could be hit if farmers adopted new methods — as Maher has been doing — fast and on a large scale. A 14 per cent fall in nitrogen fertiliser use was the most significant driver of the fall in 2022 emissions.
Teagasc predicts that overall cattle numbers will naturally trend down, to 6.8mn cows in 2030. If farmers also adopted new technology significantly, emissions would fall to 17mn tonnes by 2030, roughly meeting the sector’s 17.25mn goal, the agency found.
Karl Richards, acting head of the Teagasc Climate Centre, said large herd reductions should be a “last resort” in reaching those goals.
If the herd size fell to 6.5mn, emissions could fall still further, to 16.4mn tonnes, Richards said. “By combining high adoption rate[s] with slight reductions in the herd, we can achieve the targets,” he said.
Pat McCormack, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, saw potential in a voluntary herd reduction scheme as suggested by a panel set up by the agriculture ministry last year.
Under the ministry’s proposal, farmers would receive a payment of €3,000 per cow, adding up to almost€200mn a year. But McCormack said nothing had been confirmed, adding: “If there’s no budget, what are we talking about?”
The agriculture ministry said officials “are currently working to explore” the reduction proposal further. Elections are due within 18 months and parties will be keen to court the powerful rural vote, according to analysts.
Dale Crammond, director of Meat Industry Ireland, said a better plan would be to slaughter cattle earlier for beef. That “has a very significant capacity to deliver on carbon reduction”, he said.
Farmers can take some comfort. According to Marie Donnelly, chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council, “agriculture is not the bogeyman. Quite honestly, our single biggest challenge right now here in Ireland is transport.” Ireland’s transport emissions rose 6 per cent last year.
But for Maher, the dairy farmer, one thing is clear: “If we want to sell our image as a green country, we need to do more.”
