I’ve had to adapt this spring. Cows who haven’t calved yet are now outside.

Summer calving is a new unplanned venture but it’s something that has to be dealt with. The first loads of heifers and first calves have gone off to the out-farm for summer grazing with a few more to follow once they have their pneumonia vaccine booster.

It’s easier to do that job here and isn’t as labour intensive. There is one calf that has eliminated herself from becoming a cow here. She’s far too flighty already and when I’ve come through a spring of calving heifers who were extremely pleasant, I don’t fancy taking a step backwards with animal docility.

It’s also one of the first years our BPS will be applied for later than usual. Two attempts were made at sorting out the BPS but because we have not received a GLAS payment we are unable to apply until this is rectified. So much for technology speeding things up.

It doesn’t help the case being made to direct all payments online.

Technology, while brilliant when it works, can be unreliable. My phone reception is more unpredictable than the weather but at least the wi-fi works. That opens up a window to the world through social media and that has its own pros and cons.

Camera phones and social media have changed the game for farming. Of late it has shown the disconnect that has evolved in Ireland between farming and its customers.

The saying that most people are only one or two generations away from farming may have held true in the 1980s and 1990s but that gap has widened as the years have passed.

As society evolves, what may have been acceptable in the past won’t always cut it in the future.

Every year the gap in knowledge of farming practice widens. We’re not too far away from a time when those who market produce on our behalf will have little experience of farm life and reality that entails.

We need to be more aware of it. We may not always agree with other people’s views but it is important to know them, especially when they are customers either for our produce or for our scenery as tourists.

The livestock sector in Ireland plays a critical role in maintaining our green landscape but it faces challenges on many fronts. The policy battlegrounds have moved from boardrooms to the palms of people’s hands with a flurry of different facts and figures available to justify whatever agenda you want.

Ireland’s increase in dairy cow numbers is often used as a stick to beat the livestock sector with. Curiosity got the better of me lately so I went trawling through the CSO archives. Cow numbers reached a high of 7.64m head of cattle and that was in 1998.

A few other snippets showed that there were slightly more cattle in the country in 1972 than there were in 2015 and that for 37 of the last 50 years cattle numbers were higher than the 6.6m cattle that were in the country at the end of 2016.

Looking at those figures surprised me. For all the for-and-against stories I’d heard about the growing national herd, it has been relatively static for the last 50 years.