An environmental permit system proposed by the European Commission for farms with 150 livestock units (LUs), or more, will lead to the destruction of Ireland’s family farm, according to the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA).

The proposal, being advanced under the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED), will require cattle, pig or poultry farms, or mixed farms, that exceed 150 LUs, to have a permit to operate.

And, those farms that require permits would be requested to pay €2,400/year.

President of ICMSA, Pat McCormack, has appealed for some degree of logic to be brought to the debate “before it’s too late” he said.

He said the idea showed the extent of the disconnect between bureaucratic abstraction and the reality on the ground.

“We’re back here to the one constant factor in the problems affecting Irish farming and agri-food: The idea that the answer to underlying problems is simply heaping more and more irrational and costly regulation on the farmers, while everyone else in the supply chain is just left to do their own thing.”

He said this [permit proposal] was the latest and possibly “most counter-productive” of a long line of “damaging and destructive ideas that don’t solve anything and only serve to make things worse”.

“Farmers in Ireland are fed up with multiple agencies issuing multiple forms to be completed and multiple regulations to be met,” he added.

The idea that farms could now be regulated under the IED is, he said, “mindboggling”.

“The irony is that industrial-scale farms wouldn’t be the ones struggling to meet the regulatory costs involved in these bizarre ideas. It would be the family farms – the very ones we need to preserve – that would be left struggling to meet this latest layer of regulatory costs.”

He said the ICMSA and farmers, generally, are demanding that their politicians signal a categoric rejection of this “ruinous idea”.

Articles by tag: environmental permit

Permit system will 'regulate family farms out of existence'