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 Congratulations to Dwayne Shiels from Donegal for being crowned our 2023 FBD Young Farmer of the Year Winner! What a night & what an incredible group of people we had contesting for this year’s FBD Young Farmer of the Year Awards! Huge congratulations to each of our 15 semi-finalists! You really are all fantastic ambassadors for Irish Farming in your fields. A special well done to all of our category and award winners and to our runner up! Land Mobility & Overall Winner - Dwayne Shiels from Donegal Dry stock & Runner Up - Patrick Egan from Mayo Best New...

Press Release: 31 July 2023 Macra na Feirme has laid out its priorities for Budget 2024 for creating a stronger more progressive agricultural sector and vibrant rural communities for young people to live and work. The focus is on creating a future for rural Ireland and our agricultural sector, with some of the main priorities being around accessibility to land and greater supports around housing. “Macra members want to see positive changes and that change starts with investing in young people as we are the future of rural communities. Our budget submission this year has a broad mix of different...

Press Relase 31st July 2023 This August bank holiday weekend, Clare Macra will be hosting Macra’s Summer Blowout event at The Inn at Dromoland Hotel on Sunday the 6th of August. This is a special event as Macra’s three sub-committees, Competitions, Agricultural Affairs and Rural Youth, have come together to work on it together. From this combined effort, the morning conference, called “The Future in Our Hands” has been created. We are super excited to say that the day will kick off at 11 am with our guest speakers Trisha Lewis, or better known as Trisha’s Transformations, International Rugby player,...

Macra strongly condemns the shocking practices shown on the RTE investigates programme which aired last night. Macra and our members, have always stated a zero-tolerance approach to the mistreatment of animals. “What was shown throughout the programme is truly disturbing. As farmers we care for our animals and we never want to see them mistreated as depicted in the RTE investigates show” said Macra National President Elaine Houlihan. “Since 2019, we as an organisation have been calling on the government for supports around the use of sexed semen in the dairy herd to incentivise more viable breeding practices. In our...

Much has been written about the calamitous pollution going into the atmosphere from dairy cows in this country. To counter this, a proposal is being worked on to reduce the size of the national dairy herd by 10% over the next three years.  Macra President Ms Elaine Houlihan said “I am astounded that we are looking to reduce our national herd of dairy cows by 180,000 head in the next three years, while Brazil is planning to increase its herd by 30 million head by 2030.”  Ms. Houlihan continued, “the emissions all go into the same atmosphere, with the difference that...