As we harvested last week, it struck me as a country and agricultural industry, how dependent we are on foreign manufactured machinery.
I was surrounded by combines made by John Deere, Claas and New Holland. It was the same with the tractors. The only major piece of equipment manufactured in Ireland was the chaser bin used for conveying grain from the combine to the truck or yard.
This was the biggest chaser bin I had ever seen, holding about 30t of wheat and made just down the road by Cross in Rathangan, Co Kildare. It had very wide tyres and three axels to minimise compaction, and twin augers to speed up emptying. Cross Engineering grew out of a long-established blacksmith and metal fabrication business, and has exported beet-washing equipment all over the world, including to what we would regard as the home of high-precision heavy engineering, Germany.
Indigenous Irish industry has disappeared from a lot of areas. Think of shoes, textiles, carpets, car assembly – the wave of multinational investment, mainly in IT and pharmaceuticals, has, in the main, concentrated on using intellectual property developed elsewhere. The profits also flow abroad. Indigenous Irish industry is different and it is striking how much of it is agri related.
We are accustomed to think of the high visibility agricultural output processors – the meat factories and dairy product manufacturers. These have the advantage that while their costs of labour and general operations are high, they can adjust the price they pay to their farmer producers to ensure consistent profitability.
The input suppliers have no such leeway, but also have to import the metal raw materials and pay full Irish costs. It’s not just Cross, but the extraordinary success of the McHales, based in Ballinrobe, with their baler technology – which has seen them export to countries around the world. That was the second example of high-caliber Irish engineering I noticed in the fields this harvest.
There are other remarkable Irish successes in the agri space. If Irish agriculture is allowed decline, these important regional employers and innovators will wither. We would all be losers and the over-dependence on multinationals for employment and Government tax revenue would be accentuated.
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