As 2020 mercifully winds its way towards a new year, farmers are being invited to share their views on the next Nitrates Action Programme. And it’s about a lot more than just the derogation.

As usual, farmers are fearful of change and what that will bring for them. It’s hard to blame them for that, for it’s hard to remember a time when so much was in flux.

The new CAP is largely agreed, but remains a blurred picture. The plan for Irish farming towards 2030, the successor to Food Wise 2025, has been pushed back until well into next year.

Next month will bring the once in a lifetime challenge of Brexit, accompanied by Veganuary, which most farmers perceive as an assault on everything they do and are.

It’s worth taking a quick glance in the rear-view mirror to see how far we’ve come since joining the EEC. The average farmyard is transformed. In the 1970s, animals in loose housing ate outdoors from pitfaces, with large concrete yards mixing rainfall, waste silage and cowshit into slurry that was scraped into huge dungsteads. And they were regarded as the lucky ones. Lots of cattle stood around fields and feeders, destroying them for the year to follow. Now animals are mainly on slats covered by mats for comfort.

If you had told the average farmer in 1980 the money he had spent, spurred on by the grants in the farm modernisation scheme, would be dwarfed in the 1990s by the multi-billion Control of Farmyard Pollution Scheme, he would have said it was beyond his capacity, especially if you told him prices would be little better.

But we did all that and survived two recessions. And we’ll meet whatever changes are asked of us now. The farm organisations will oppose and challenge change, not because it can be avoided, but because it must be supported by Government and by Brussels, and be at a pace we can cope with.

Farmers can be instinctively conservative, which is understandable when you understand their main goal is to protect the land that was handed to them, and safely pass it on to another generation. This is the Farming Prime Directive, our Hippocratic oath to do no harm. But doing no harm means protecting that soil, the air it breathes into, and the water that flows through and around it. We honour our forebears by embracing change, just as they did in their time. Farmers who refuse to accept that are letting us all down.

Isolated incidents of individuals not respecting the environment let all farmers down.