Farmland Is Where Irish Nature Is Won or Lost
The biggest question in Irish conservation is simple to ask and hard to answer. Most of Ireland's land is farmed, so the choices farmers make every year decide what the countryside looks like for wildlife. What to graze and how hard, when to cut the grass, what to spray, how to look after ditches and hedges: these day-to-day calls shape Irish nature more than any protected area on a map.
National parks and nature reserves matter, but they are islands in a sea of farmland. The birds, insects and plants inside them do not stop at the boundary fence. That is why schemes that pay farmers to manage land for nature alongside food are central to any real plan for bringing Irish biodiversity back.
The idea is getting fresh attention. On 26 September 2026, The Irish Times reported on Fionn Ó Flaithearta, who returned to his 100-hectare family farm on Inis Mór in 2023 and now hires out goats for targeted grazing. Under an agricultural scheme, he can be paid for that grazing and for thriving wildflowers. It is one farm on one island, but it captures a bigger shift: farmers being rewarded for the nature their land produces, not just the livestock.
The Corncrake Is Coming Back Where Farmers Are Paid to Help
The clearest proof comes from one of Ireland's most famous birds. The corncrake, once the sound of every Irish summer meadow, had been squeezed to the western edges of the country. In September 2025, the National Parks and Wildlife Service reported 281 corncrake territories, up 20% on the year before. That is the highest count in 25 years, and a 70% rise since 2018.
The NPWS was clear about who deserves the credit. Around 250 farmers and landowners are now managing close to 1,500 hectares for corncrakes through the Corncrake/Traonach Conservation Programme. That means cutting hay later in the season, mowing from the centre of a field outwards so chicks can escape, and keeping patches of tall cover where the birds can hide. None of it is complicated. It works because farmers are paid for the time and grass it costs them.
Curlew: Buying Time for a Bird on the Brink
The curlew is in a much tougher spot. Only an estimated 100 breeding pairs remain in Ireland, the Irish Farmers Journal reported in July 2025. But the response has stepped up. A €25 million European Innovation Partnership project for ten breeding wader species, co-funded by the NPWS and the Department of Agriculture, runs from 2024 to 2028 and builds on the earlier Curlew Conservation Programme.
In 2025, a new headstarting programme gave the species an extra push. Eggs were collected and hatched at Fota Wildlife Park, and 15 young curlew were released back to the wild at Lough Ree and Lough Corrib in July. Local farmers are central to the whole effort, because the curlew nests on their land. Recovery here will take years, but the tools and the partnerships are now in place.
ACRES: Taking the Idea Nationwide
The Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme, known as ACRES, is where this approach goes to scale. It pays farmers for actions such as wildflower field margins, hedgerow care, later cutting, lower fertiliser use and looking after wetland and farmland bird habitat. In November 2025, Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon announced nearly €147 million in advance payments to almost 34,000 ACRES farmers for the 2025 scheme year. A further €37 million in balancing payments began issuing in April 2026.
That is tens of thousands of farms now earning money for nature work. ACRES also has a co-operation strand, where farmers across a whole landscape are scored and paid for results. That matters, because most wildlife needs connected habitat across many farms, not a single well-kept field.
Costa Rica Already Ran This Experiment — and It Worked
If paying farmers for nature sounds optimistic, one country has already tested the idea from end to end. In The Irish Times on 5 March 2026, John Gibbons described what happened in Costa Rica, a country that had cleared half of its mature forests by 1980 after decades of logging and ranching, from a starting point of 75 per cent tree cover in the 1940s.
The turnaround began in 1996, when forest clearance was outlawed without explicit approval. A year later the government launched PES — Payments for Environmental Services — which pays farmers an annual fee of about $64 (€54) per hectare for protecting forest, with soft loans on top for those who commit to leaving it standing. The money comes largely from domestic carbon taxes on fossil fuels, in place since 1997. Because the payment roughly matches what the same land would earn from cattle, farmers can keep the trees and the income.
The results are hard to argue with. Forest cover, down to around a fifth of the country at its lowest point in the 1980s, has climbed back to 61 per cent. Nature recovered, and ecotourism boomed along with it. More than a quarter of Costa Rica's land area is now protected — against barely 2 per cent at home. The same debate is live in Ireland: the Independent Advisory Committee on Nature Restoration has been told that a new fund, outside the CAP, is needed to pay farmers and landowners for restoring nature, with income forgone a significant part of the cost.
The Hare's Corner: Small Spaces, Big Difference
Not every success needs a national scheme. The Hare's Corner, run by the charity Burrenbeo Trust, takes its name from an old farming phrase for an awkward bit of a field that was never farmed hard and so was left to nature. The Irish Examiner, which has followed the project as it spread beyond Clare, reported in December 2025 that the 2026 round would open to landowners, schools and community groups across nine counties — among them Limerick, Offaly, Donegal, Sligo, Monaghan and Louth — with support for wildlife ponds, mini-woodlands, hedgerows, mini-orchards and plans for nature.
More than 1,000 Hare's Corners have now been created since the project began, as the Irish Examiner has noted. Burrenbeo works with local authority biodiversity officers, supported nationally by the Heritage Council, to deliver it. There is no cost to the landowner and very little paperwork. The only ask is that each person looks after their own Hare's Corner. It shows that new habitat does not mean giving up good farmland. Corners, ditches, streams and field edges can do a lot of the work.
Communities are doing the same thing at a wider scale. The Biodiversity Fund run by Community Foundation Ireland and the NPWS is set to take the number of community biodiversity action plans past 300 in 2026, building the local network that joined-up conservation needs.
The Bottom Line
Paying farmers to farm for nature is no longer a theory in Ireland — or anywhere. Costa Rica paid its farmers to protect forests and watched tree cover climb back to 61 per cent of the country. The corncrake is at a 25-year high where Irish farmers are paid to help it. The curlew now has a €25 million rescue effort and a headstarting programme behind it. Around 34,000 farmers are earning ACRES payments for nature work, and projects like the Hare's Corner and an Aran Islands goat herd show how much can happen on ordinary farmland. The next step is scale and staying power: keeping the schemes that work going for long enough, and linking farms across whole landscapes, so that Ireland's farmland becomes the heart of its nature recovery.