Philip Boucher Hayes

If the wind farm gets planning permission, it will sit right on their boundary fence.

They have to go somewhere.

So why not here?

You do indeed have a huge cultural burden to overcome there.

But the bigger point that you're making

is equally knotty and it is that you have all of these targets that have been set, each of them laudable and desirable in their own right, but they're all set without reference to each other.

Are there studies to that effect showing the impact of turbines on animals?

Everybody's just working in a little silo and nobody is trying to do joined-up government.

Yes, there is, yeah.

Saying what?

I looked this up.

There are some studies done about putting livestock and turbines together, but they are very far from conclusive.

I asked Chagas, our agricultural research agency, had they done any work in this area.

They haven't.

I also spoke to farmers with livestock grazing amongst turbines.

They reported no loss of yield or thrive in their herds.

But in farmer WhatsApp groups, claims to the opposite effect are being shared that suggest cows will and do have a stress response.

Ultimately, we will need wind turbines on about 2% of the country's land.

mature forests so that's going to impact on all those other targets you talked about they'll probably all have to be pushed upwards creating even more pressure on the land bank pat i left out one critical thing from all of those land uses and that is those livestock farmers who are now going to want to expand their land holding in order to be able to spread their nitrates a little bit more evenly what's going to happen to the price of land in the course of the next few years

A clear national policy based on sound evidence would be helpful to everyone in deciding how land should be used.