Irish potato growers are experiencing difficulty renting land as a result of new EU regulations, the IFA/Teagasc National Potato Conference and Trade Show heard in Maynooth yesterday.
Michael Hennessy, the Teagasc potato expert, said the lack of availability and the cost of renting land was a major obstacle to the growth of the potato industry.
"To maximise the Single Farm Payment, landowners are reluctant to rent land to others to grow potatoes and when it can be found, it is becoming much more expensive than in the past," he said.
Mr Hennessy said potato farmers could only take a crop off the same piece of land every five years and the need for rotation meant that a lot of area was needed to grow the national crop. "The cost of renting land is driving up planting costs," he said.
It emerged at yesterday's conference that there is no record of how many potato farmers there are in the country because only a postal census of growers and acreage is currently being carried out by the Department of Agriculture and Food.
The IFA's national potato chairman, William Monagle, said it was unacceptable that the department did not know the number of acres of potatoes grown in the State since its inspectors stopped carrying out a census in 2005-2006.