Recently I travelled through the Baltic countries visiting farms to see what this often overlooked agricultural region has to offer and it got me thinking about our nitrates derogation.
With an open and warm welcome, it left me with a new appreciation for what a drive to improve your country and community can do and how short-sighted we Irish can be, including in terms of our derogation.
This region was devastated twice since World War II, first by Soviet occupation which evolved into subjugation as part of the Soviet Union, then oddly the second disaster was the collapse of that same Soviet Union.
One of the lasting legacies of Soviet domination of Latvian agriculture was the exploitation and erosion of once rich Baltic soils.
The loss of organic matter in particular has become a massive limiting factor in their arable sector, which makes up over nearly 70% of agricultural land area.
One farmer we visited was Ed Noordam who runs ‘sia Grinis Organic Farming’ manages over 1400ha of various organic crops.
Despite being very much settled in Latvia, Ed was not born in the Baltic state but chose to move there, and frequently arranges shipments from his birthplace of the Netherlands.
Rather than favourite foods or teabags, Ed arranges shipments of pure concentrated cow dung!
Shipped over 2,000km between Rotterdam and the port of Riga benefitting both sides, helping the Latvian soil improve its organic matter and helping Dutch farmers meet their nitrogen limits.
Derogation
The Netherlands is often compared to Ireland in our difficulties with nitrates derogation but while their challenge dwarfs ours in intensity, it does not in scale.
In 2020, the Netherlands had a national average stocking density nearly three times greater than ours at 3.2LU/ha versus our 1.3LU/ha.
Despite this, the total numbers of cows is similar. As of December 2023, the Dutch dairy herd was barely greater than our dairy herd alone with Ireland having 1.51 million dairy cows to the Dutch 1.55 million.
When you add the approximately 818,600 beef cows Ireland has, that are basically non-existent in the Netherlands, you get an idea of scale.
The recent debacle with the Straw Incorporation Measure should give us another pause for thought. How is it that a country like the Netherlands can ship cow manure nearly 2,000km (1077 nautical miles) yet Ireland struggles to ship manures from Cavan to Wexford?
The answer is poor policy. The divisive scheme and even more divisive attempts to prevent it impacting on fodder and creating an animal welfare crisis have aided neither tillage nor livestock farmers.
Solutions like 70% grant aid to importing farmers seems, on the face of it, to be a solution, however the failure to update reference costs along with the spike in concrete prices has taken the shine off the grant.
Add to this, many in tillage question the logic of them having to spend 30% to, as has been described to me, ‘fix a dairy issue’.
Instead, funding might be better applied making it more feasible to improve the circularity of our agricultural system.
Slurry
The first issue is that slurry is rarely viable to transport the distances from livestock areas to where its really needed due to the fact average slurry is 91.7% water.
Tripling this to 30% dry matter, or even 40% with some systems, reduces transport per kg of valuable organic matter by three times.
This is precisely how Ed and his team can afford to ship manure internationally allowing Latvian farms to stockpile it for easy spreading and incorporation.
Nearly every Dutch, Flemish and German farm I’ve visited had a permanent separator onsite. In Ireland, this level of permanent investment is less justifiable due to our seasonal nature.
Unfortunately, because of the rules currently applied on slurry separators, farmers cannot seek support for a more efficient portable system.
A minority of contractors do provide the service but it’s still rare; reforms to Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme (TAMS) could provide a simple solution to many farmers by allowing mobile units be grant aided.
However even if farmers can provide a more useful manure to our tillage sector with mutual benefits, Ireland lacks any policy infrastructure to assist in facilitating the development of a common sense solution.
The perpetual fear of ‘interfering in the market’ has lead to such a lack of creative intervention, instead relying on the uncreative and insufficient strategy of simply offering grant aid only on slurry storage.
This is not helped by a lack of perspective and courage within farm organisations to risk their reputations by proposing anything new.