As usual driving up to Balmoral Show I was struck by the amount of first-cut silage made.

This year was no exception except that a higher proportion of the fields had already greened up.

The existence of Northern Ireland’s Parliamentary Assembly means that there is a local political layer who feel perfectly free, even at ministerial level, to criticise the Westminster government and Andrew Muir the Alliance Minister for Agriculture didn’t pull his punches as to how he saw the new inheritance tax affecting farmers.

He had he said taken it up strongly with Westminster and would continue to do so.

However, he was much less conciliatory when it came to the environment. Pretty well the entire Department stand at the show was taken up with water quality.

The new nutrient regulations were, not surprisingly, a huge concern, but in my view much of the ministerial and official attitude is driven by the very public deterioration in the water quality status of Lough Neagh, the largest lake by area in Britain or Ireland.

Talking to some of the Department personnel on their stand, I was surprised at their pessimism. They put the time it would take to fully restore the lake to health at an incredible 50 years.

They put the problem down to a high level of phosphate in the silt on the bed of the lake which, coupled with the shallowness of the lake, means that as the weather warms up, there is no stratification of layers of differing temperature, but just a uniform explosion of blue green algae across the lake surface.

It would seem to me that serious farming has to continue in the Lough Neagh catchment area, but there are a number of possible solutions which should not be discounted.

The first is to examine the example set by the buoyant and important Northern Ireland poultry industry where anaerobic digestion of the poultry manure is playing a pivotal role in both getting rid of the excess nutrients and generating energy.

Bovine slurry could be similarly treated though the economics would not be as favourable as with poultry manure.

There should also be a major scientific investigation to establish if there is a binding agent that could combine with the phosphate in the silt.

Lessons in restoring fresh water lakes could be learned from Lough Sheelin which is, mainly in Co Cavan. The lake has recovered well from major problems some years ago and good farming is still taking place in its catchment area.

The basis for the initial major improvement was a transport subsidy to get slurry out of the area, a move which should be seriously looked at in the case of Lough Neagh and highly stocked milking platforms.