Budget 2025 has come and gone with no formal response from government to the Food Vision Tillage Group Report.

Irish Grain Growers’ Group (IGGG) chair, Bobby Miller, put it very nicely, when he recently pointed to the fact that the beef and sheep sectors have received a long-term support package: so why the delay, where crops are concerned?

The good news story at the tillage sector present time relates to the decent spell of weather that kicked in the week before the 2024 Ploughing Championships and has stayed with use ever since.

It has allowed cereal growers to complete the 2024 harvest with a degree of comfort and, what’s equally important, has permitted them to get on with autumn planting work in an extremely ordered fashion.

As a consequence, Teagasc has confirmed that winter cereal plantings are already back up to 2022 levels.

But a spell of decent weather has done nothing more than paper over the fault lines within Irish tillage.

By common consent, the sector was the big loser when the detail of the last Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) agreement was thrashed out.

A range of other factors including enhanced input costs, poor grain prices and dreadful weather, have added to the woes endured by tillage farmers over the last two years.

Yet the sector is expected to be a flagship vehicle when it comes to Ireland’s response to the threat posed by climate change.

Expanding the footprint of the tillage industry to some 400,000ha is now firmly embedded in Ireland’s climate change planning.

In the meantime, the industry is moving backwards, both in terms of its actual footprint on the ground and the number of farmers actively growing crops.

The report of the Food Vision Tillage Group was supposed to address all these issues, and it did.

However, up to this point, it seems to have done nothing more than take up space in Minister McConalogue’s office.

Many thought that Budget 2025 would have been the perfect vehicle around which the government could have framed a response to the Vision Group report, but such was not the case.

Meanwhile, tillage farmers await some direction from the minister regarding the long-term policy options for tillage that best meet the needs of the country and those farmers committed to the growing of crops.

In the meantime, frustration at farm level continues to build.