Macra Land Mobility: prepare your farm succession questions

Macra's Land Mobility Service helps landowners and farmers explore collaborative farming arrangements, including leases, share farming and partnerships. AI can help you prepare a brief and questions before contacting the service. Keep it to organising your own information and supplied public guidance. Let the service and your professional advisers handle matching, terms and decisions about land, tax and succession.

Checked 4 October 2026. This is an independent FarmAI guide. It is not a Macra partnership or an offer of legal advice.

What does Macra's Land Mobility Service do?

Macra describes Land Mobility as a confidential brokerage service: it outlines options, explores workable arrangements and works with farmers' existing professional advisers.

The service's own website calls it a subsidised independent expert service. It supports people considering expansion, a different enterprise or stepping back. It does not represent just one party to an arrangement.

Those are useful distinctions. A potential landowner and a young trained farmer may have different needs. The job is to explore whether a workable arrangement exists, rather than to persuade either side to sign something.

What should a young farmer prepare before the first call?

Write a short brief in your own words. Include the enterprise you want to run, relevant training, practical experience, the broad area you can work in and what you can realistically commit to. List what you need to learn about any proposed arrangement.

Keep questions grouped: land and facilities; responsibilities; money and records; duration and exit; and the professional advice needed. You do not need to publish private financial details to start that list.

Landowners can make a separate brief about their aims and constraints. Sharing the landowner's account with an AI assistant requires their agreement; private family matters belong in the professional conversation.

Our young-farmer scheme paperwork guide keeps CIS-YF, National Reserve and capital grants separate. Do the same here: possible access to land does not automatically establish grant eligibility.

How can AI help with the preparation?

Give it a short anonymised brief and the public text you have chosen:

Using only my brief and the supplied Land Mobility information, organise questions for an introductory call. Group them by responsibilities, records, costs, timing and exit. Identify missing information. Do not choose a partner, draft binding terms or invent tax reliefs or grant eligibility.

Read the output yourself. Delete questions that do not fit your circumstances. Add anything important that you did not tell the assistant. Our first AI prompts guide explains this source-checking habit.

This is a preparation job. An assistant cannot establish who owns a parcel, obtain another farmer's private scheme records or know whether both parties will work well together. Do not treat an attractive summary as due diligence.

What should stay with the professionals?

Teagasc's farm-transfer guidance is a useful starting point for the professional conversation. Your solicitor should review binding agreements and land rights. Your accountant should check tax and financial consequences. Your farm advisor should check enterprise planning and any scheme implications.

Use a draft question list to improve those conversations. Do not assume an AI-written lease is suitable or that it will reduce a professional fee. Costs depend on the actual work required.

For family transitions, our succession preparation guide can help you organise the conversation. It does not replace the people involved making their own decisions.

How do you contact the service and check costs?

Use the contact route on the official Macra Land Mobility page, which directs enquiries to the service and lists info@landmobility.ie. Confirm the current contact before sending personal records.

Ask what the initial conversation involves, what fees may apply, who receives your information and what happens next. Read the Terms of Engagement before committing. “Subsidised” does not mean every service is free.

A Macra club could use the public prompt as a discussion exercise with invented examples. That would help members practise asking better questions without exposing anybody's farm or family details.

Frequently asked questions

Is FarmAI connected to Macra's Land Mobility Service?

No partnership is being claimed. We link to its official information and explain a way to prepare for a call.

Can AI find a farm or decide an arrangement for me?

This guide uses AI to organise questions. Discuss actual opportunities and suitability with the service and your advisers.

Is the Land Mobility Service free?

Its website describes a subsidised service. Ask for current fees and engagement terms rather than assume there is no charge.

The bottom line

Prepare one short brief and a list of questions. Contact the service through its official route, check fees and confidentiality, and involve your professional advisers before agreeing anything. AI can organise the first page; the arrangement needs real people.