The Ag-Biota research programme is an effort to measure the impact of farming practice on biological diversity within the wider landscape, delegates to the Ag-Biota conference at UCD heard.
It will provide an information baseline against which future change can be measured.
"The impact of farming on the environment is huge," said Ag-Biota programme co-ordinator Dr Gordon Pervis of the faculty of agri-food and the environment at UCD. It affects air, water and soil quality but also takes its toll on the general landscape and built heritage.
There were two options available to encourage a changed approach to farming: the stick, involving legislative sanctions, or the carrot, involving incentives such as Reps, the Government's Rural Environment Protection Scheme, Dr Pervis said.
He preferred the carrot, but it was also essential that much more be learned about the interaction between agriculture and the environment before appropriate measures could be devised to reduce impacts.
A key question in the debate must be whether biodiversity is something we should be worried about, he said. "What happens when you lose species? Does it really matter or is there some price to be paid in the future?" he asked delegates. The Ag-Biota programme was an attempt to fill this knowledge gap, he said
A principal scientific officer in the Department of Agriculture, Frank Rath, described how the Reps programme attempted to hold the line on species loss by introducing incentives to encourage protection of habitats.
Reps came into service in 1992, he said. It provided incentives for farmers who reduced fertiliser and pesticide inputs and reduced farm outputs. "What we were trying to do was get farmers to modify their practices slightly to benefit wildlife and biodiversity," Mr Rath said.
The latest Reps programme, the third, aims to bring at least half of all farmers into this voluntary scheme, he said. It is much more developed in terms of supporting biodiversity, with farmers encouraged to be pro-active by creating new habitats, renewing hedgerows, planting broadleaf trees and protecting field margins.
Two earlier speakers described efforts in Northern Ireland and in Scotland to reduce threats to biodiversity posed by modern intensive farming.
