While many argue that we should not allow new forms of land ownership to disrupt the farm, farms are already in the process of disrupting themselves. There is a young generation of farmers that are in fact seeking to rent instead of buy land to improve their return on capital.
What do JP McManus, John Magnier, Bill Gates and the British Royal family all have in common? Apart from being billionaires, they are all large landowners, quietly going under the radar to acquire massive amounts of global farmland.
Dasos Capital, with strong backing from the State and the European Investment Bank, has quietly assembled the country’s second-largest private forestry portfolio. How did it do it? And, how much is the portfolio worth?
Technological change in agriculture and food may have to adapt to shifting consumer priorities after Covid-19, but the pace of innovation remains unabated. Here is a look at six big ideas – and one possible spoiler.
After changing hands twice, the debt of farmers who had borrowed from ACC ended up in a dual structure set up by CarVal under new rules governing Section 110 companies. How successful has it been in reducing the vulture fund’s Revenue bills?
The Climate Change Advisory Council has laid out what is feasible to cut Ireland’s greenhouse gas emission by half in ten years. It boils down to balancing disruption between the power, transport and heat used by every home and business or the agri-food sector supporting entire rural communities.
The urgent need to stop carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels is nothing new, but farmers and food processors were hoping the different gas released by livestock could be stabilised. The IPCC’s new report shows it must go down too.
Fabien Peyaud is the co-founder and chief executive of Herdwatch, a Co Tipperary-based agritech firm now marking ten years in business. He discusses falling in love with Ireland, learning on the job at a US multinational and betting on a cloud-based app before farmers even had smartphones.
The Common Agricultural Policy accounts for one in every five euro of Irish farmgate revenue and the EU has finally struck an agreement aiming to make it “simpler, fairer and greener”. A new battle begins now to decide how Ireland’s agri-food industry will deliver this.
A destructive fire plunged the Belfast-based agri-tech group into the red in 2020 and triggered a board reshuffle, but growth was slowing before that. To turn R&D into profit, its CEO Richard Kennedy says the group now wants to bring in new shareholders.
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