Full coverage: Agriculture

Having raised expectations with a sugar-coated Climate Action Plan last year, Eamon Ryan and Charlie McConalogue are faced with the hard reality of carbon budgeting figures. It could be make-or-break time for the coalition.

A six-year battle between Kerry Co-op milk suppliers and Revenue has come to an end in the High Court. The right to subscribe to “patronage shares”, although a receipt of regular trade, will not inflate the farmers’ income tax bills.

Politicians turning the sod on Glanbia Co-op and Royal A-ware’s new plant yesterday were upbeat about the prospects for higher-value dairy processing and the removal of the legal barriers that delayed the project until this year.

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.