The normal working year is taken to be 1,800 hours, or 225 days.

Many farmers will laugh at the notion that 140 days should not be worked on a farm, but consider a non-farmer employee with a five-day week, public holidays and normal leave allowance and the 225 days is not far off the mark, but what is happening on farms?

For dairying, with a good layout, the standard man days allowed per cow is five, so dividing into 225, each man unit should be capable of fully looking after 45 cows. I accept that the standard man days for agricultural productivity have not been revised for some time but, nevertheless, they give a useful indication of the productivity that can be objectively expected from farmers.

However, the Teagasc Farm Planning publication gives an excellent picture of what is actually being achieved on Irish farms. The “average” dairy farm has 73.5 dairy cows and 80 other cattle between calves and heifers. All together, 112 livestock units with 1.4 labour units supplied by the family and just 0.2 hired in.

What we are seeing is the Irish family-based farm model delivering almost twice the level of output that would be indicated by the normal standards of productivity per labour unit.

On tillage farms, with combinable crops, the standard allocation is 3.75 standard man days/ha with the more important machinery hired in. This would give a total of 60ha or 150ac as the expected output of a man year. Again, this is far below what is actually being delivered by farmers, especially when account is taken of the significant number of livestock that are on the normal tillage farm.

What we are in effect seeing is greatly enhanced productivity by Irish farmers but more to the point, a huge reliance on one-man farms with some family labour.

Of course, this may make our farming systems more resilient in that family members and especially the farmer that supplies the vast bulk of the labour can take a severe cut in income in a difficult year. While this keeps the farm in business, it is giving the country a level of output and generates economic activity way over and above what could be expected if the objective criteria were observed. This, especially in a year like this, raises the fundamental question of how much pressure we can expect people to bear and continue to function normally?

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