The story when explained and documented with real facts and numbers makes powerful reading and absolute sense. Many of the towns around rural Ireland are built on food.

Go to any of the towns featured in this year’s Agribusiness report published with the Irish Farmers Journal this week in association with KPMG – Ballyhaunis, Enniscorthy, Charleville, Cavan or Cookstown in Northern Ireland. The very existence and economic viability of these towns are built on food and farming and have been for over 100 years, in many cases – just talk to businesspeople trading in the town. While food and farming dominated even more so for hundreds of years prior to this, the capacity of the industry to innovate and grow has been phenomenal. The capacity of the milk, beef and the tillage sector to create employment in spin-off businesses and services to the core food industry has blossomed in the last 50 years.

In many cases, these food businesses are what I call anchor tenants in the rural towns. Other small businesses exist because they exist.

Take Ballyhaunis in the west of Ireland. Two large food businesses dominate the town’s employment – Dawn Meats and Western Brand. Both employ over 500 staff all year round. Importantly, both have indirectly established numerous businesses that exist because of the trade involved doing business with the anchor tenant, such as transport, plumbing, construction and catering, etc.

Gravity model

The same can be said for so many rural Irish towns. Lorcan Roche Kelly calls it the local “gravity model” effect and it starts with the farmer. Dawn Meats would not be in Ballyhaunis if it wasn’t for the 300,000 sheep or the 80,000 suckler cows in the vicinity of the town. While herds are smaller in the west, Dawn management knows what to expect and manages this accordingly.

It will be very interesting to see if trees and forestry will overtake drystock in the west, as Ian Proudfoot describes is happening in New Zealand at the moment). Will the beef and sheep farms in the vicinity of Ballyhaunis move to growing trees, either as permanent forestry or in conjunction with livestock farming?

If we stand back and look at how small beef and sheep farmers are rewarded for their endeavours, it is stacked against cattle and sheep.

All the big EU money is being funnelled into forestry and organics, which both mean less livestock. Coupling of payments to stock is not an option our Government is taking.

Environmentally, food is taxed where it is produced, not where it is consumed, which is a problem for a productive country like Ireland that exports most of its food.

Cost of production on farm is increasing, making food produced more expensive.

So what gives? Will part-time farming only exist for a generation? Will forestry eventually take over? What consequence does that have for a town like Ballyhaunis? What effect does that have on the fabric of the town, the viability of the town, the spin-off businesses that exist in the town from the supermarkets to the tyre shop?

More questions than answers.

Need for information

We need to get more information on the actual benefits that the Agribusiness report highlights this week.

We need to get the information for every rural town. We need it for every county.

We need everyone, including farmers, to understand the benefits of food and farming.

Let that information be the starting point in the discussion when someone enters the airwaves talking about farmers and food producers as if they were a problem and a blight on society.

Walter Furlong in Wexford is showing that farmers can change practice and evolve if they have the right measures and the right advice to be more environmentally conscious. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.