Some 55 of those companies predicted they would create 1,090 jobs, 150 seasonal roles and 20 internships between them in 2017.

In terms of employment for 2017, the majority of companies were very conservative in their estimates – as they are every year, but this year, Brexit is on the horizon, and this exacerbated their caution.

However, even taking Brexit into account, employers are always extremely cautious when predicting employment in the future and the number of jobs that will be created across those 55 companies in 2017 is likely to be much higher than 1,090.

The Irish Farmers Journal’s activity on the careers, education and recruitment front has extended beyond this paper to the Agri Careers Fair, which takes place in the RDS.

Last year was the first year we ran this event and it was a great success. Almost 50 exhibitors participated and had over 1,120 roles to fill on the day while there were over 7,000 attendees vying to fill those roles. The Irish Farmers Journal will be announcing details of Agri Careers 2017 over the coming weeks. We intend making it bigger and better this year and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

The survey

A total of 235 companies were contacted for this survey, and 86 responded, 73 of those with details about their employment activity.

Many of you who responded to the survey would have been speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal’s Conor McLellan who carried out a huge amount of the survey work.

We appreciate you making time to chat to Conor and the team look forward to speaking to you again next year.