"Green" policies are destroying this country

Its far from a joke. The greens are actual de-facto traitors and saboteurs to this Island. They do whatever Alliance 90 orders them to do. Eamon Ryan is happy to do it too, nice cushy job for him to go to sleep to over on the continent when he is booted out of the Dail in two years time.

The traceability of Irish beef is important. The farm to fork model. There are very stringent restrictions on what is killed, when it's killed, how its killed and what's in it when killed within the EU. The US have different laws and Brazil, well, let's just say less.

The EU needs to be, and has always trod to ensure that we're are self sufficient with food. The war in Ukraine shows how interrupted supply lines can damage this. Ireland are a net exporters other countries are not, relying on foreign food staples regardless of how wealthy you are is never wise

We're a net importer of food since the year 2000

You could survive but would be hungry and miserable for the rest of your life. Remember, eating fruit and veg from overseas would not be acceptable either so you would have a very limited range.

Of course we import food. What planet are people living on if they don't know we import lots of different types of food. We live in a global economy where imports of all types of goods have increased exponentially in the last couple of decades. Lots of food we can't produce here or at least not all year round. And let's not get started on the ever rising quinoa and avocado imports.

What is this shite that the food sector alone should provide everything and we shouldn't export anything? Which other sector is this demanded of? What other country in the world doesn’t import and export foodstuffs?

Vegetarians eat dairy which is being highlighted for these cuts.

maybe look at the post I was responding before you reply to my post

would you buy brazilian beef? I wouldn't, I'd have chicken or something instead.

Isn't the appeal of Irish beef it's green grass fed image? How would Brazilian beef replace it so easily? Serious question, I would have thought they're a totally different product and brazilian stuff wouldn't be very marketable in Europe.

I wouldn`t dream of eating it, but then I am living in Ireland. If I was living somewhere else and there is no comparable product to Irish beef, (and there are few if any that are),then I might have no choice.

It`s marketable because its produced cheaply and Brazil exports 60% of the beef we do to the rest of the E.U. while we are a member state of the E.U. they add 24 million cattle while we are expected to cut ours by 2 million all for the supposed sake of global emissions.

Explain the reasoning behind that nonsense to me.

Yes it's ridiculous, if the EU has real aims of reducing emissions they should ban the import of emission heavy foods like beef from these places. It's stupid sh*t like this which just makes it obvious to me we are incapable of joined up thinking and the whole planet is f*cked.

Yield on organic farms eventually exceed conventional farms. It takes a decade or so for yields to reach parity with conventional agriculture. It is entirely possible for Ireland to reduce its fossil fuel inputs to agriculture and maintain yields but it requires a wholesale shift away from fertilizer and pesticide based farming. If that were to happen I would start to buy into the grass fed beef narrative.

Sri Lanka showed what happens if you go organic, and a 5 year study by the University of Zurich showed exactly the same for Europe attempting the same.

A ban on a wheat pesticide without and alternative being allowed resulted in a drop of 11 million tonnes of wheat grain in France. With a stroke of a pen E.U. green policy created 55% of the world shortage of wheat grain that Putin`s war did.

The lunatics really have taken over the asylum

If you're going to make bald statements about organic systems and yields versus conventional systems over time where current research says otherwise you're going have to better than simply make a claim that organic yields will exceed that of conventional farms. On a commercial scale that's total bs.

"For decades, there has been debate about the possibility that organic farming can feed the world’s population. The most recent studies, analyzing the yields of individual crops, show a yield gap between organic and conventional farming. The rotations and the intensity of soil use are also different between systems and the impact of this factor on productivity has not been assessed. A meta-analysis of the yield data of organic and conventional crops and the intensity of soil use (years with harvest crop in relation to rotation duration) was carried out using studies published in peer-reviewed journals. The yields under organic farming were on average 25% lower than the conventional ones, reaching a yield gap of 30% for cereals. The intensity of soil use was also lower in organic systems, the size of the reduction depending on the type of study: field experiments (7%) or on-farm studies (20%). Combining the yield gap with the reduction in the number of crops harvested in the rotation, a productivity gap of 29% to 44% was estimated depending on the type of crops included in the rotation. These results show that the productivity gap is greater than the yield gap between organic and conventional farming."

Do you imagine that farmers worldwide go to the bother of purchasing expensive fertilisers etc when they could get even better yields according to your good self without the self same fertilisers?

Currently there is no food shortage globally - largely because of the green revolution and adoption of fertiliser and herbicide/ pesticide use globally.

If you've ever tried to grow crops organically you would know your first sentence simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

And if you know anything about beef cattle rearing here - beef cattle are indeed predominantly grass fed