No tillage scheme or funding will be available for tillage farmers ahead of the beginning of the 2026 planting season, despite the Government failing to meet its targets to increase tillage area to 360,000ha by 2025.

Catch crops will be planted in July and oilseed rape in August, but Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon told the Irish Farmers Journal: “I can’t give any commitments about future budgets.

“Our Ministers for Finance are telling us how much pressure our own budgets are going to be under depending on what happens in the next couple of weeks with the US with trade and tariffs and what happens our income to the state for income tax and all the other measures that are there so I can’t make clear commitments on that.”

The Minister explained: “I have to negotiate my whole budget ahead of the national budget in October. I’m not in a position to make any funding commitments beyond that. It would be reckless of me to do so. What I would say is I’m looking at every tool available to me to support the sector.”

“I’m not in a position for any sector to tell them what I’m going to be able to do in the budget because I don’t know what’s going to be available to me,” he said.

The past two years have been difficult for tillage farmers. The Minister commented: “€38,000 is not enough of an income for tillage farmers when you consider the price of renting land, when you consider the cost of machinery and the need to keep that updated.

“This is a sector that’s highly innovated, highly mechanised, has a lot of risk involved with it, farmers would need to be much better rewarded for it.”