Full coverage: Agriculture

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.

Meat may be a low-margin business, but the scale achieved by Peter and John Queally has made two generations of multi-millionaires. An in-depth investigation of over 300 companies reveals their corporate structure and business strategy.

Farm incorporation theory is rock solid from a tax perspective. However, a farming father and son have been left with a huge tax bill after routing their Single Farm Payment through their personal accounts, not those of their company.

An Taisce’s challenge to Glanbia’s cheese factory raises many questions: Is litigation against individual projects the new policy battleground? How much of a facility’s supply chain should be scrutinised in the planning process? Experts offer varied answers.

From science to soul-searching, the industry is showing signs of a deep shift in addressing its environmental impact. The bad news is that the rest of the world has moved on, and rules are long set for the rest of this decade. The good news is that work taking place now will be useful to tackle the real challenge coming after 2030.