We’re all enjoying the fantastic coverage of the Olympics, with the RTÉ sports department punching its weight as well as our fantastic athletes.

Environmental activists have contrasted the resources RTÉ dedicates to sports to the lack of a dedicated reporter on climate issues.

A concerted campaign highlighting RTÉ’s failure to link recent extreme weather events at home and worldwide to global warming saw the broadcaster’s managing director of news and current affairs Jon Williams forced into an embarrassing climbdown and apology this week.

Williams went even further in committing to individual training for all RTÉ journalists on climate change and promising to create a “team” of people to report on climate change.

Meanwhile, there isn’t even a murmur of a new agriculture correspondent. The corn that was planted in March when Fran McNulty left for the fresh pastures of Prime Time will be cut soon.

There has been a sizeable gap in agriculture coverage at a time when the industry is facing huge changes.

The retirement of RTÉ’s midlands stalwart Ciaran Mullooly, an Ear to the Ground alumnus who was astute and perceptive on rural and agri-food issues, is an additional blow.

The task facing farming is to maintain its output to continue to feed the planet while radically reducing its carbon footprint.

Farmers have to deal with a deafening cacophony of keyboard-warrior farmer-bashing on a daily basis. The agriculture community isn’t asking RTÉ to sugarcoat the realities. It just wants informed and objective reporting of a key cog in rural Ireland’s economy and society.

Floods in Germany, the diminishing Amazon rainforest, the thawing Siberian permafrost and the heatwave in Canada have given us all a glimpse at a terrifying future.

Vulnerable

As the sector that is vulnerable to not just the weather and climate change, but also globalisation, Brexit, Mercosur and looming changes under CAP, surely the national broadcaster can spare a correspondent for agriculture?