Global supply constraints on sunflower oil and a spike in the price of olive oil have meant home-produced rapeseed oil has become more common on Irish supermarket shelves.
Sales are forecast to grow to €33.3 million by 2029, a projected 35% increase in value.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has affected the supply of sunflower oil and climate change is raising the price of olive oil.
Market research from Euromonitor International for Bord Bia found that although olive oil remains the dominant category, rapeseed oil retail sales reached €24.7m last year.
The planting of the oilseed rape crop has also increased by more than 70% in Ireland in the last five years, with over 16,000 hectares grown last year compared to just 9,000 hectares five years ago.
There are currently no major oilseed rape processing plants in Ireland, resulting in more than 40% of the crop being exported, much of it to the UK for animal fodder or for use in more highly processed vegetable oils.
Newgrange Gold is one of a number of small rapeseed oil businesses that have begun operating in Ireland.
"With climate change, we've got to start looking at solutions that mean a lot of our supply chains are closer to home," explained the company's director Jack Rogers.
Mr Rogers began the business with his father John, who purchased the company’s first small oilseed press in the Boyne Valley in Co Meath in 2011.
The company is trying to compete with extra virgin olive oil in the culinary market by producing products that will appeal to chefs for cooking as well as for salad oils.
The oil is cold pressed and can be infused with flavours including garlic and chilli as well as lemon and herbs.
"Rapeseed oil is an ideal opportunity to try to produce something that's healthy, that's got low airmiles and supports Irish jobs," Jack Rogers said.
The oil is versatile with a high smoke point, he said, and it also contains Omega-3 and other essential fatty acids "so it’s actually quite a good oil to use for your everyday dressings, baking, frying and that kind of thing".
The company purchases its crop from the nearby Hobson family farm at Warrenstown in Co Meath where oilseed rape is grown regeneratively as a break crop.
It is rotated in a tillage cycle with other crops such as winter barley, winter wheat and spring beans.
"It’s good for breaking up soil, the root grows deep so it’s a good crop to help improve yields with other crops," said Mr Rogers.
While planting of the crop has increased in Ireland recently, in the UK confidence in it has dipped due to pests like the cabbage stem flea beetle which have made farmers less likely to invest in the relatively expensive seed.
Originally from Co Cork, Dr Aoife O'Driscoll is a Senior Specialist in Crop Protection at the UK's National Institue of Agricultural Botany (Niab) and has been researching ways to deal with the beetle.
"Eight years ago was when we first started to see the damage appearing," she explained.
There were a number of reasons why the pest began to take over in the UK where larger fields of oilseed rape can often be grown as a monoculture.
One was stricter controls around neonicotinoid insecticides, which were banned at EU level in 2018.
These chemicals had been used to stop the adult flea beetles in the autumn.
Secondly, climate change played its role too.
"One of the compounding factors really was there was a tradition here in the UK for farmers to drill the oilseed rape over the August bank holiday weekend, which is often the driest part of the year you can get," Dr O’Driscoll said.
She said the dry conditions were resulting in a lack of vigour, which increased the ability of the adult cabbage stem flea beetle to take over and decimate the crop.
Dr O'Driscoll said that even as the rate of planting of oilseed rape continues to grow in Ireland, it is unlikely to suffer the same problems as have been experienced in the UK.
It is actually well adapted to the wetter Irish climate which results in more moisture in the soil.
"The UK is very arable focused. It doesn't have the livestock and the grass and the rotation that we would have in Ireland. It’s probably a positive thing for Irish growers," she said.
Problems with the flea beetle have also declined more recently due to research and more careful management, including methods like mosaic cropping, planting catch crops and having grazing and livestock as part of the rotation.
Grazing the oilseed crop is something that the Hobson family have already begun experimenting with in Co Meath, with spring lamb being introduced onto some of the crops early in the year to help increase root depth and reduce infection from diseases on the young leaves.
Since they began growing oilseed rape in 2010 the Hobsons have also introduced other regenerative practices such as minimal tillage, increasing soil health and the use of organic manures, including chicken litter sourced from Cavan and Monaghan to try to reduce their use of artificial fertilisers.
The crop remains very difficult to grow organically, however.
Each year before harvest in the summer, it still has to be artificially dried out or desiccated with chemical herbicides before the seeds can be removed.
The small brown seeds are dried out in storage before they go on to be cold-pressed into rapeseed oil.
In the spring, the bright yellow flowers of the crop attract bees and other pollinating insects like hoverflies, which get both nectar and pollen from the plant.
Professor of Ecology and Vice President for Biodiversity and Climate Action at Trinity College Dublin Jane Stout said whether the crop is good for Irish biodiversity depends very much on how it is grown and managed.
"If its managed with a lot of insecticide to control those potential pests, the beetles, the weevils, then that can be impactful on the pollinating insects that visit the flower because the pesticides can end up in the food resources, the nectar and the pollen but they can also end up in the soil and that can have impacts on organisms that live in the soil but also other plants that take those pesticides up into their own tissues," she said.
The oilseed rape crop is an insect-pollinated plant that has evolved over the years with insects and the way it is currently grown in Ireland is unlikely to prove to be as problematic as it has been in the UK.
It can also exist alongside other food supplies for pollinators such as sunflowers, orchards and wildflowers or be grown in rotation with other flowering crops such as buckwheat.
"We do still treat for insect pests in Ireland, so there's various beetles, weevils in particular that can damage different parts of the oilseed rape, the plant as its growing and the ovaries of the developing seed which is the important part for the oil crop," explained Prof Stout.
However, she added: "The way we grow oilseed rape in Ireland tends to be in smaller patches so we don't get those extensive monocultures and they are less at risk from pest attack."
It is currently Government policy to increase food and feed security by growing the area under tillage across all crops to 400,000 hectares by 2030.
Adverse weather events meant there was a slight decrease last year in the area under tillage to 334,450 hectares, compared to 2023.
The Department of Agriculture, through the Food Vision Tillage Group, has commissioned a feasibility study through University College Cork to investigate whether more seed oil can be commercially processed in Ireland in the years to come.
