Over the last week, in between the showers, I have felt swamped by my lack of IT skills. Is it only my generation that keeps putting off work that involves going online or is it universal?

I had three official tasks to do. By far the most important in the short term was the completion of this year’s Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) application. This had to be in by last Monday, 17 May, and because of some domestic rearranging, it had to be done correctly.

However, when the appointment – online, naturally – came round I had to quickly recheck what was planted in each field. This matters this year particularly as I had to be clear what fields had beans – the wrong acreage submitted for a per-acre top-up payment would not be funny and would be ranked as either careless or fraudulent.

We also had to complete the Bord Bia quality assurance scheme details

I also had to specify clearly how many hectares of crops I intended to submit for the Straw Incorporation Scheme. Anyway, it all got done with a copy of everything submitted, sent and printed out.

We also had to complete the Bord Bia quality assurance scheme details. Again, with all the cattle going to the factory, we simply have to qualify for this payment of 20c/kg.

This year, it was all done online with photos having to be uploaded in a single file, etc. Luckily, over the weekend, a family member willingly swung into action and dispatched various completed electronic files.

The final IT obligation was the transfer into my herd of some dairy beef cattle I brought on the land.

We rang the dairy farmer from whom I bought the cattle and I was relieved that he passed the call over to one of his technologically literate children

Normally, we buy through a mart and they seamlessly transfer cattle from one herd number to another. We really struggled with the system as I longed for a piece of ordinary paper to simply write down the numbers.

We rang the dairy farmer from whom I bought the cattle and I was relieved that he passed the call over to one of his technologically literate children. The problems got sorted out and the file was transmitted.

All of this activity would have been classified by a previous generation as “not really farming at all“ but try to survive in today’s world by not doing it from both a regulatory and a financial viewpoint.