Last week, well over 3,000 farmers went to the farm on which the Irish Farmers Journal has taken a 15-year lease. As Justin McCarthy spelled out in his editorial last week, the object of the exercise is to see if a well-done, drystock beef and sheep farm can return a decent income and to identify the pitfalls, opportunities and practical realities.

But as I walked around, absorbed the atmosphere and welcomed the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, I reflected on what a unique institution our predecessors formed in the Irish Farmers Journal.

It was in the mid-1960s that the then owner of the Irish Farmers Journal, John Mooney, put the paper, without any payment to himself, into a charitable trust with the purpose of improving Irish agriculture in the broadest sense.

It was just a few years after that that Paddy O’Keeffe, whom John had hired as editor, chartered a jumbo jet to New Zealand.

With Common Market entry imminent, Paddy reckoned that a large sample of Irish farmers should be exposed to a country that was leading the way in efficient grass-based dairying.

Many of today’s most prominent dairy farmers were either on that trip themselves or one or both of their parents were. It has left an indelible mark on the evolution of Irish farming.

Closer to home, the Irish Farmers Journal paid for the first slatted house built on the now Teagasc beef research farm at Grange, while also bringing over the leading world practitioners in the growing of winter cereals at a time when they were almost unknown in Ireland.

As GATT (WTO) free trade talks began, a young economist was hired with financial help from AIB to carry out the first in-depth look at the competitiveness of Irish agriculture in world terms.

The young economist, Gerry Boyle, went on to become a university professor and then director of Teagasc. It is remarkable how little the relativities between Ireland, other countries in Europe and the wider world have changed since then.

As the dairy quota regime came to an end, the Irish Farmers Journal, again anticipating farmer needs for up-to-date, practical information, leased, with two partners and with Teagasc involvement, the 300-cow dairy farm at Kilkenny to measure how economically and practically viable was large-scale grass dairy farming, producing manufacturing milk, going to be for family farms in Ireland.

Truly valuable

The Tullamore Farm, spearheaded by our livestock editor, Adam Woods, follows that logic. It may be labelled as simply a demonstration farm but it’s the meticulous transparency of every cost and husbandry detail that makes it truly valuable.

The original legacy of John Mooney, where a farming newspaper was established with no dividends or directors’ fees and an unwavering commitment to farming improvement came back to me as I saw the crowds come last Tuesday.

Part of the legacy is to cooperate with like-minded people and institutions that can help in the attempt to improve both technical efficiency and farm family living standards.

We can too easily forget on whose shoulders we stand.