Womens' role in agriculture has been invisible and has been undervalued for a very long time, Catherine Lane from the National Women’s Council (NWC) said during a panel discussion at the Sinn Féin tent at this year's Ploughing.

However, things are beginning to shift due to the persistence of a number of women and womens' organisations to try to get female farmers in the spotlight and on the agenda, Lane maintained.

"In particular, some targeted programmes and schemes to try [to] encourage women entrepreneurship in rural areas and programmes for knowledge exchange for women working on farms.

"Really that contribution hasn't been visible in the statistics, we don't have the data, we don't understand their position or their experiences," she said.

'Decent livelihood'

Lane said that the NWC looks forward to research on women in agriculture being published by the Department of Agriculture in the coming weeks.

Lane added that there should be a "decent livelihood" out of farming and producing food in a sustainable way.

"It's also about addressing that under-representation of women who do contribute to family farms, but they're invisible in terms of agribusiness, co-operatives and farming organisations - they need to be there in balance with men in terms of making the decisions, looking at where the investment needs to go if we are really to make farming sustainable into the future," she said.

Women have not been at the table in terms of decision-making in rural Ireland and they need to be invited to the table and they need to be invited to be there, Lane argued.