Monday night saw three meetings between farmers and key sectoral partners. Conor Galvin, Ornua CEO, acquitted himself well by all accounts at an IFA meeting in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, in the heart of Tirlán country. Boortmalt turned up in Carlow to meet growers, but had no crumb of comfort to offer them. It looks like troubled times ahead for the malt barley sector.

But the third meeting? The issues around Larry Murrin being chairman of Bord Bia has been a dominant theme of this column all year. On Monday, Bord Bia brought the Farmers Forum on the road to Dungarvan, Co Waterford.

A strong team of senior staff highlighted all the work that Bord Bia do validating the standard of Irish food and drink and marketing that food worldwide.

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But the moment the mike went to the floor, Murrin inevitably came up. The Murrin situation will resolve itself in a few months time, when his term of office ends, unless Minister Martin Heydon manages to find a successor who will antagonise farmers as much.

However, the issues farmers expressed around Origin Green will not fix themselves. A lot of effort was made by Bord Bia’s range of senior personnel to explain how Origin Green is beyond the farm gate, a broad-ranging production quality standard for over 300 food and drink companies. However, at the end of the night, now with a better understanding, it seemed that farmers liked Origin Green less.

The fact that Origin Green extends equally to food and drink companies who overwhelmingly use imported produce as it does to companies who overwhelmingly use produce from Irish farms, provided they meet the “continuous improvement” criteria, was not acceptable to the room in Dungarvan or Carlow. How to fix that to retain long-term buy-in to the quality assurance schemes is the challenge facing Bord Bia.

On Monday morning, another meeting discussed an even more critical issue. Minister Heydon met with the farm organisations to discuss the “negotiation box” compromise proposals for the next Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU budget to cover 2028-2034. This was presented on behalf of the 27 member states by the Irish presidency who had brokered the package.

The simple truth is that the Irish Government couldn’t find an extra euro for farming or the CAP over and above the €293bn proposed last year by the European Commission. It is saying that is in the context of a smaller budget than the von der Leyen/Serafin one. And that is true. But it is also true that this budget, announced by Fianna Fáil TD Thomas Byrne, is €580bn bigger than the current MFF.

So the Government is willing to put its name to a package that cuts funding for farming by €93bn within a bigger budget. It didn’t have a strong hand, but farmers are wondering how well it was played.

This will impact farmers incomes more than Murrin, Boortmalt or Ornua’s butter strategy ever could. And we all have to live with the consequences.