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HomeFarming News‘Small farming communities are suffering continuous shelling’
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‘Small farming communities are suffering continuous shelling’

In this article, Gerry Loftus, Rural Ireland Organisation, shares his views on rewetting and the Nature Restoration Regulation. 

Farmers will rebel against rewetting our agricultural land. The best way to describe rural Ireland in this recent years is similar to a war zone.

Small farming communities are suffering continuous shelling, and as time goes on, the bombardment of our rural livelihoods is getting heavier and heavier.

If we are not being blitzed by the government, then it is farming organisations that are carpet bombing our way of life. The EU has just launched a ballistic missile in the form of a legally binding Nature Restoration Regulation.

This is a European law imposed on each member state on the Restoration or Rewetting of peat soils which will include farmland.

The figures show there are 35,000 square kilometres of peat soils in Ireland either damaged by turf cutting or have been drained to be turned into agricultural land. This equates to 871,000 acres in total.

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Peat soils 

By 2030, under this EU law, 20% of peat soils must be rewet; by 2040, 50% and by 2050, 70% of this land must be rewet.

There is also a serious intention to compulsory purchase land where a farmer does not comply.

The Rural Ireland Organisation will never agree to this. We are calling on farmers to stand up and fight back.

We are calling on all farmers and people in rural Ireland to unite and support the campaign to be launched shortly by RIO.

Some of this land was drained with spades and shovels by our ancestors; they would turn in their graves if they knew what was happening.

Land improvements were made by backbreaking work on small farms of bad land so that parents could raise their families.

We must and will respect the hard work carried out by the generations that came before us.

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