The Dealer was interested to read some recently published research that shows women were involved in agriculture long before they were elected to positions of power within the IFA.

A study of the skeletons of European women from the neolithic period, Bronze Age and Iron Age has shown that prehistoric women’s bodies were designed to carry out heavy manual labour.

Their bone structure shows that they had strong upper bodies, stronger even than modern-day rowing athletes.

This type of strength was needed for repetitive pulling in one direction, which researches writing in Science Advances have concluded was probably hours of hoeing, digging and hauling.

Those women were likely to spend long hours doing laborious tasks like digging ditches, dragging crop baskets and grinding grain.