The Food Vision Tillage Group, set up by the last government, seems to have gone to ground over recent months.

So, are we to left conclude that a few weeks of good weather was, indeed, the much awaited cure for all the ills that face Ireland’s cropping sector?  

The launch of the group’s much vaunted report seems like a distant memory now.

The Irish government, initially in the guise of then agriculture minister, Charlie McConalogue, was to have responded officially to the publication but we are still waiting.

One assumes that the mantle of responsibility in this regard now rests of the shoulders of the new Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon; we are still waiting.

All the talk at the time was that the Food Vision Tillage Group report would not be allowed to gather dust on a shelf.

However, my lungs are now choking, metaphorically, with the fast-growing layers of cobwebs that now envelop the one or two copies of the report that were initially sent to Agriculture House.

Meanwhile, the core issue which the Food Vision Tillage Group was set up to address remains untouched.

And it all goes back to Ireland’s Climate Action Plan. Within this fundamental policy objective for the Irish government there is a very explicit target - to expand the footprint of the tillage sector up to 400,000ha by 2030.

Please note, this is not an aspiration. it is a specific target, which the government is honour-bound to meet.

And progress to date in striving to meet this target has been patchy, to say the least.

Everyone agrees that expanding the scope of tillage makes sense, from every perspective. Ireland has both the available land and the famers with the required expertise to make this happen.

The tillage sector has proven, time after time, that it has an inherently low carbon footprint. And, over all of this, of course, is the fact that Ireland is a significant importer of grains – and has been for very many years.

So the core economic case to produce more home-produced cereals and protein crops is an absolute no-brainer.

The Food Vision Tillage Group was established to help drive forward a coherent future strategy for crop production in Ireland.  

The silence of its members - including representatives from all the farm lobby groups – is pretty deafening at the present time in my opinion.

And, let us be honest, these same people are pretty quick to stand up and criticise others when that ‘need’ arises.

All of this begs the fundamental question - where is the real vision for the tillage sector?