John Gibbons

speaker

1,007 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3d ago

John Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · Should Farmers Get Funding To Help The Environment? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

That makes us enormously import dependent.

The second thing, of course, is that you might say, well, hang on, surely it's fine because we're such big exporters of meat and dairy.

Now, here's the question, right?

In order to feed, for example, our rapidly expanded dairy herd,

We are now importing about 5 million tonnes of animal feed every year into Ireland.

Now, of that, by the way, about 2 million tonnes is just for dairy cattle.

So this is vast.

That's 40,000 tonnes of imported animal feeds coming from God knows where.

The harm of that, of course, is that it means that we're carrying far more cattle than our land can support.

Because, to your point, if this was simply the Borbia idea that all this grass is magically jumping out of the ground and that's all that we require, well then, of course, we wouldn't be importing 100,000 tonnes of animal feed a week, Matt.

100,000 tonnes a week, which is what we're currently importing, number one.

And number two, we wouldn't be able to continue down that pathway.

So we've built this massive dependence, this huge dependence and growing dependence on imports.

Now, of course, as well as that, if you go from, say, 19... Sorry, would I suggest, could we not just make the animal feed for ourselves?

Well, the thing is, to make the animal feed for ourselves, we would obviously have to have an expanded tillage sector, right?

So, for example, at the moment, the Irish tillage sector is about 7% of our land use, right?

It has declined sharply.

The reason tillage farmers will tell you that they can't till and they can't plant cereals is because they're outbid for leasing land from dairy farmers, because dairy farmers are the ones making the big money.

The average profit...

for a dairy farmer in Ireland last year, and this is a great commercial success, was over €150,000 per dairy farmer.

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