Nearly 60,000 Irish farmers will be excluded from growing renewable energy crops for which major incentives were announced last week.
The Department of Agriculture and Food confirmed yesterday that farmers who are in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Reps) are not eligible for the €8 million energy crops scheme.
Those farmers in Reps enter into a five-year contract to farm in an environmentally sensitive manner.
However, it has emerged that they will be unable to grow replaceable energy crops such as miscanthus and willow which would not only provide green energy but reduce harmful emissions.
The grants announced last week, which were trumpeted as a major boost for the sector, will see farmers getting 50 per cent in aid towards the cost of planting the energy crops.
A Department of Agriculture spokesman said yesterday that the European Commission had ruled that the new grants would not apply to farmers in Reps.
"It is a matter of bio-diversity. We cannot create mono cultures and we do not know what the impact of growing large swathes of crops such as elephant grass will have on the environment," he said.
"There is only a limited amount of miscanthus being grown here and that will have to be monitored in relation to the bio-energy schemes."
He said the issue would be taken up with the commission and the department would await the response to the new grant system for growing elephant grass and willow.
The issue first surfaced at the Teagasc National Tillage Conference on January 31st last when the exclusion of Reps farmers from energy crop production was described as "an anomaly".
The Teagasc alternative fuel expert, Bernard Rice, who has pioneered the growing of elephant grass at the Oak Park Teagasc facility, said the restrictions on farmers in Reps was an anomaly which needed to be eliminated.
The aid announced by Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan has, for the first time, made the growing of energy crops here profitable.
She said €8 million was being allocated over the period 2007-2009. This means that up to 1,400 hectares of willow and miscanthus could be grant-aided in this, the first year of the scheme.