Opinion: farmers need to be careful what they wish for

For a tillage farmer, I seem to often find myself in rooms full of dairy farmers. Of course, I'm not there as a tillage farmer, I’m there as a reporter, but you can take the farmer off the cornsower, etc, etc.

This week saw me at two meetings of almost exclusively dairy farmers, with very contrasting moods, although the issues presented from the floor were identical.

I reported in this week’s paper on Monday's Tirlán meeting in Portlaoise. Here are a few thoughts on Tuesday evening's Just Farmers public meeting in Gorey.

About the venue

The Just Farmers meeting was in the Tara Rocks complex, just outside Gorey town. Unless you’re from Wexford, you probably won’t have heard of Tara Rocks. They are a rural GAA club, but within the parish of Gorey.

GAA eligibility rules, being parish-based, means anyone from the parish of Gorey can play for them. They have long been the small relation, with Naomh Eanna, based in the town, the big brother.

A few years ago, Tara Rocks entered a formal arrangement with the Kilanerin club from the neighbouring parish, amalgamating at adult level (they have shared underage teams for some years).

So what, Pat, says you. The thing is, there was some disquiet around the county when this happened. It meant that anyone from Gorey could play for Kilanerin, one of the strongest football clubs in the county (Mattie Forde, John Hegarty, Paudie Hughes today).

The fear was that this might lead to Gorey lads more interested in football defecting through the Tara Rocks loophole.

It never happened.

Naomh Eanna are in rude good health, having won the county senior hurling title this year. They also won the intermediate football title. There were no football defections to Kilanerin/Tara Rocks, who are pedalling along nicely in football and competing strongly in underage in both codes. Sometimes our darker suspicions never come to pass.

Gathering

It was natural enough that this thought would run through my head while I was sitting in the fantastic club and community facility Tara Rocks have built.

The large meeting room/indoor gym/arena was pretty full - I counted north of 200 people in the room.

We were gathered at the invitation of a group calling itself 'Just Farmers', which had organised this meeting.

It would have been only slightly unfair to call them 'Just Dairy Farmers', but there was a clear sectoral bias among the attendance. The organisers are all dairy farmers, part of a discussion group.

Five of them shared the top table with two invited guest speakers. They were Denis Drennan, the new Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) president, and Paul O’Brien, the new Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) south Leinster chair.

O’Brien’s presence ensured one sheep farmer in the room, with Alice Doyle, the new IFA deputy president, a rare drystock cattle farmer among the attendance.

It was fair going for the organisers to secure these three guests at a meeting with no agenda to speak of, by a group with no track record of public engagement.

Perhaps the eagerness of the newly-elected to prove accessible played a part; geography certainly did, with Doyle a local and both Drennan and O’Brien from Kilkenny, not much more than an hour away.

The first speaker, Seamus Hughes, spoke of methane, carbon and the warming effect of Ireland’s cattle herd. It was a mix of generally accepted information regarding methane volumes and persistence and partly views that would be characterised as climate-change sceptic.

Concise

The information was presented in a concise way, with absolute conviction and clarity. I was not in agreement with some of it, but it felt like I was in a minority in the room in that regard.

The next speaker was a young farmer, Daniel Kennedy, who reflected the frustration of dairy farmers with how nitrates, banding and other environmental regulations have combined to curb the output and potential of family farms.

The level of investment made over the last decade, and the level of encouragement from Government to do so, only fuels this sense of injustice.

There were a lot of young farmers in the room and I was looking forward to hearing their contributions, as it’s rare enough to see 20-somethings at farmer meetings.

Drennan and O’Brien then addressed the meeting, affirming the right of farmers to feel undermined by recent changes, apprehensive of potential further near-future changes and betrayed by the people who had hyped dairy expansion through Food Harvest 2020 and its successors.

A succession of speakers from the floor criticised the failure of farmer representatives to prevent bad things happening to them

And then the meeting turned into just another IFA/ICMSA meeting. A succession of speakers from the floor criticised the failure of farmer representatives to prevent bad things happening to them.

As is often the case, the IFA bore the brunt of the criticism. As the largest farm organisation, that is understandable.

It felt a meeting of a discussion group, where they invited farmer leaders along to interrogate them on recent failure and future plans. Which is basically what it was. And is also perfectly fine, by the way.

The thing is, Paul O’Brien and Denis Drennan address farmer meetings within their own organisations every week of the year. I’ve heard their perspective and viewpoints many times, and will again. This felt like an opportunity lost to hear from the floor.

Different perspective

After a couple of days reflection, I think that analysis is harsh on the organisers. The reality is that the floor probably had little by way of suggestions or solutions to offer separate to what the farm organisations do on a daily basis - dialogue and representation.

There was an appetite for direct action to gain the Government’s attention. Talking to a variety of people after the meeting, the prevailing mood seemed to be 'if they won’t listen to our legitimate concerns, and act on them, it’s time to block the ports'.

Farmers were this week watching direct action in France, following from what has happened in Germany and previously in the Netherlands. They have a sense of urgency that something needs to move the dial here and across Europe.

The hope was expressed to me that a victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November would signal the end of any prospect for global co-operation on climate change action. “We could farm away if that happens.”

And that is probably an accurate prediction should Trump win. Particularly if the next European Parliament, having shifted to the right as recent polling would suggest it will, saw an alliance between the centre-right and the far-right.

Especially if food security climbs the charts of political priority in the event of Russia gaining dominance in Ukraine, which also seems more likely if Donald Trump is president of the USA.

But I’m pretty certain that is a scenario no young farmer should be wishing for.

Perilous times

We live in perilous times. The world is destabilising in many regions, quite apart from the horrors in Ukraine from Russian aggression and in Gaza where Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinian people looks more to me like vengeance than self-defence.

North Korea is threatening its cousins in South Korea, whistling past all our graveyards. China is eying up Taiwan.

The conflict in Yemen, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in recent years, has now spilled over into affecting global shipping trade, bringing the wrath of the west onto the same civilians who are caught in the crossfire of their countries’ vicious civil war.

Regional conflicts in Africa are constantly erupting, many of them fuelled by the borders drawn across 19th century maps by European colonisers.

It affects us because the geopolitical mood will certainly have an impact on the regulations surrounding farming

And all of this affects Irish farmers. It affects us because we buy our inputs from a global commodities market and we export our produce to similar markets.

And it affects us because the geopolitical mood will certainly have an impact on the regulations surrounding farming.

If the EU feels global food supplies are destabilising, it may adjust its thinking on food production and food security.

And if the USA pulls out of the COP agreement, as it did during Trump’s previous term of office, that might undermine the whole apple cart in terms of Europe’s climate ambition.

But the world will be a worse place if those things all happen. And it will be a worsening place too. And I can’t wish for that - for myself, for Irish dairy farmers or anyone else for that matter.

It's very likely that dairy farmers, and all farmers, will be faced with further environmental regulations if we avoid that grimmer near-future.

But I believe farmers have the resilience and resourcefulness to cope with that eventuality. And there will have to be help from Government in supports and from consumers in realistic food prices.

Like the Tara Rocks/Kilanerin merger - and most other things - our worst fears of changes often dissipate as we live with them.