What is the Bord Bia Farm Sustainabilty Platform?
The primary objective of the Bord Bia Farm Sustainability Platform, is to enable the Irish agri sector to quantify and co-ordinate the totality of sustainability activity on Irish farms. The platform is currently in the early stages of development.
It is important to note that the purpose of the platform is not to change or replace the Quality Assurance Scheme in any way, but rather it is intended to capture, encourage and communicate the totality of work at farm level across a variety of industry initiatives.
There are numerous national and regional programmes operating at farm level in Ireland and the proposed platform would be used as a centralised hub to record the scale of participation in these programmes. In this way, the Farm Sustainability platform could enable the recognition and quantification of the great work that is already being done by farmers through participation in these existing progammes.
The platform also could help to identify opportunities or vulnerabilities in areas of environmental importance on different types of farms and support the achievement of the targets laid out in the Climate Action Plan. It should allow us demonstrate the progress being made at farm level and the scale of the commitment of the sector in playing its part in addressing the climate challenge. This should help to support the reputation of Ireland as a sustainable food producing nation by building robust proof points.
The Farm Sustainability Platform would enable the efficient delivery of feedback to farmers on climate measures and provide a mechanism whereby farmers can track their chosen sustainability measures, if they chose to do so. Use of the Farm Sustainability Platform would be voluntary, with no cost implication for participation or penalty for those who chose not to use the platform.
While there have been many stakeholder consultations over a year, the development of the proposed platform is just beginning. We would like to assure all our stakeholders that we will be seeking their close involvement at all further stages and look forward to working together to demonstrate the considerable efforts and progress being made by the sector in addressing the climate challenge.