Crunching the numbers on pollution monitoring at Timoleague
Pollution monitoring at Timoleague Agricultural Catchments Programme. Pictures: Pádraic Fogarty
Ireland’s water quality crisis is mostly driven by agricultural activity and has become more acute in the years since the lifting of dairy quotas. As a result, the European Commission recently decided that Ireland’s derogation from the Nitrates Directive, which had allowed for the spreading of up to 250kg of animal manure nitrate per hectare, is to be reduced to 220kg/ha.
This is set to cause significant pain to the 2,000 or so farmers who will be forced to either reduce their cow numbers or find extra land to spread the same quantity of manure. Farm organisations and their political supporters have cried foul, variously questioning the scientific data from the Environmental Protection Agency or claiming that the proposed reduction will have no effect on water quality and so is pointless. Since the summer they have pointed to results coming from a small river catchment around Timoleague in West Cork, with high levels of intensive dairy farming, and where water quality has shown an improvement since 2019.
In September, Simon Coveney, who was Minister for Agriculture when the quotas were lifted in 2015, was challenged in the Dáil by Social Democrats leader, Holly Cairns, on his lack of preparedness for the pollution crunch, which had been predicted at the time. Coveney in turn, challenged Cairns to “take a look at the water basin project in the Timoleague catchment area to see how it can be done”.
Also in September, chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Fianna Fáil’s Jackie Cahill, said that his committee had referred “on numerous occasions to the Timoleague pilot project. In an area that is intensively farmed, with the highest number of derogation farmers in the country, water quality is improving. In that context, farmers are finding the decision by Brussels extremely galling.”
The findings from Timoleague have not gone unnoticed in the wider dairy industry. In an open letter to Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue, and published in the , John O’Brien, deputy chair of Barryroe Co-Op, expressed widely held frustration when he wrote that “the farmers in Timoleague have succeeded in carrying 40% more cows and improving water quality. Why do you and your colleagues continue to ignore this reality and the guidelines that are developed from it, which could tangibly improve water quality in other areas?”.
It has even been suggested that the EU Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius, be brought on a visit to Timoleague when he visits Ireland this month, as part of an effort to convince him to relax the rules around the derogation.
So what exactly are the lessons from this catchment and do they really show that Ireland’s hefty population of farm animals can be managed without resulting in water quality issues?
Last May, I visited the project in Timologue, which has been run by Teagasc since 2008. It is one of six catchments across the country that are being intensively studied, including taking water samples every 10 minutes using automated data-loggers. The results indeed show that the concentration of nitrates in the river has reduced since 2019. However, this coincides with abnormally high levels of nitrate in the water following drought conditions in 2018. Manure and fertiliser that was applied was not taken up by grass and so accumulated in the soil until rain eventually arrived and flushed most of it into the river.
While any improvement in water quality is to be welcomed, unfortunately the data over a longer, 10-year period shows that nitrate levels have been fairly static. And while the number of cows has increased over that period, the estuary is still failing to achieve good status.
Despite the intensive monitoring, it is not the case that farmers in Timoleague are doing anything above and beyond what is required of farmers in other areas. It would be nice to think therefore that there are lessons from Timoleage that can be applied elsewhere but that is not the case. It does show, however, that the issue of pollution is complicated.
Teagasc is keen to emphasise that the results show there is no strong link between the number of cows and the level of nitrates in the river. They point to other factors, such as the weather, the topography, and the types of soil. However, there’s not a lot that can be done about these. At the end of the day, it is the volume of waste that is applied to the land that is the driver of pollution in water bodies. If we didn’t have the source of the nitrate, we wouldn’t have the problems in the rivers and estuaries.
Farmer behaviour matters as well, some farmers do everything by the book and others don’t. And enforcement of rules around slurry storage and spreading has been lax.
Reducing the volume of manure spread on the land will not, on its own, fix our water problems, but it will help. Furthermore, the downward trend in Timoleague appears to have come to a halt this year. And so sadly, Timoleague is not the beacon of hope that the dairy industry portrays it to be.
