Farmers with a tillage enterprise are getting hit on a number of fronts from a variety of different angles this year.

Given the structure of tillage farms, typically they have a large amount of leased land as traditionally the farmer moves to put more hectares to dilute more, bigger and expensive machinery fixed costs.

The new CAP changes this year have hit some farmers’ payments very significantly. Pressure from Brussels is limiting some of the options available to farmers to manage crops effectively.

Without these tools, yields will suffer and costs will rise further.

All these significant changes make the tillage enterprise uncompetitive. Scale is not the solution for many farmers.

Given where the price of grain is now more scale won’t help. The high cost of energy and nitrogen is squeezing margins considerably.

Land pressure

Pressures from outside of tillage on livestock farmers is making land leasing more competitive and driving up the cost.

Talk of a further tax relief specifically for tillage farmers would not sound promising to me as an attempt to change the dial and prevent further decline on the estimated 9,000ha leaving the tillage enterprise this year.

Siobhán Walsh details some suggestions that might be considered by the new high-level tillage grouping.

Ultimately, if a competitive dairy enterprise continues to soak up extra land in anticipation of further nitrate rule tightening, it will be very hard to stop that happening. A tax break on top of the significant challenges listed above won’t stop the tillage area decline.