UK farmers are currently playing a high stakes poker game as they decide to cash in euro cheques for support schemes. Scottish farmers, who receive the highest average payment per farm, stand to see a €2,000 boost in payments, thanks to a 10c drop in the value of the pound to the euro over the last month. The typical Scottish support payment of €20,000 is worth €2,000 more this month than last.

The poker game is thanks to UK farmers having the option to get paid Basic Payment Scheme and coupled payments in euros as opposed to pound sterling. However, this will be their last time to play the currency markets as all future payments will only be paid in sterling.

So, farmers will be watching the money markets for their last game of ‘play your currency cards right’.

Chicken run: spike in demand for hens

While the country seems to be shutting down, one sector is booming. I’m not talking about toilet paper, but poultry.

It seems hen sellers have been inundated with demand.

“The phone has been hopping,” Brendan Moynihan from Moynihan Poultry told The Dealer.

“The same thing happened during the last recession.”

Whether it’s because of egg shortages or just a trick to keep kids occupied, it’s nice to see one good news story this week.

The poultry sector is booming during the COVID-19 crisis.

Warm fuzzy milky feelings

I had that warm fuzzy feeling this week when I heard about gardaí in Laois helping out a local homeless charity, Portlaoise Action to Homelessness (PATH), with a donation of milk.

There was a solid community effort involved, I’m told.

On the back of a request from The Laois People, local garda crime prevention officer Graham Kavanagh put the Chocolate Brown café, which had too much milk on their hands, in touch with PATH.

A good news story amidst the chaos at the moment.

Power to ye folks, power to ye.

Fury to fight farmer’s wild boar claims

It is a strange time indeed when you see world heavyweight champ Tyson Fury, a wild boar and a farmer in the same story.

In 2015, Fury tested positive for a banned substance, nandrolone, but blamed it on eating uncastrated wild boar, The Guardian reports.

The English farmer Martin Carefoot, who allegedly provided the meat, now claims he was offered £25,000 by the boxer’s team to lie.

The UK’s anti-doping agency says it will now investigate the claims.

However, Fury’s promoter Frank Warren has already rubbished the story.

I think I’ll stick to the beef.

Billy’s BPS announcement blooper

The Dealer did a double-take last week when Ireland South MEP Billy Kelleher announced a new month-long extension for BPS applications.

The European Commission had indeed offered an extension, but the Department had duly declined the offer well before Kelleher got wind of it.

At the end of Kelleher’s announcement, he included an email address to give farmers “real time updates”.

He might have to start emailing himself before making any more announcements in the future.

Prodigal son returns in style

There’s a story doing the rounds that a young Irish man who lost his job in Canada due to the pandemic decided to travel home.

However, being a high contagion risk, his father loaded the young lad into a cattle trailer at Dublin airport and travelled back with his precious cargo to Leitrim.

Videos of a young man with suitcases in the back of a very clean looking cattle trailer have emerged on social media, but The Dealer can’t confirm their source or veracity. The young man, however, looks very pleased with himself.

St Patrick’s hooley at Harper Adams

With St Patrick’s Day effectively cancelled around the world, it may be that the largest St Patrick’s Day gathering anywhere was in Shropshire, England.

The Harper Adams’ St Patrick’s Day Ball is a major social event for students in the agri college.

I understand that the Irish contingent joined over 2,500 others for the hooley. They are now back in Ireland in self-isolation, as some students had been recently skiing in Italy.

The date of the ball? Friday March 13, when photos and footage from Temple Bar pubs led to a nationwide lockdown following that weekend.

Dig for Eamon

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan took the bull by the horns, or in his case the salad by the trowel, last week with his Dáil speech. A clearly emotional Ryan said seeds should be planted on every south-facing windowsill in the country.

“So if there is any supply crisis of food in two or three months’ time…we have our salads ready to go,” he explained.

The idea of food shortages is just a bit too much to swallow for a nation that produces enough to feed 36m people.