Farming
Farming
is still a major industry in Ireland. The island has the best grass
on the planet and a reasonably mild climate. The result is a population of
8 million sheep and 7 million cows, far outnumbering the four million humans living in the Republic.
More than a decade ago I investigated the
romantic idea of setting up in Ireland as a "gentleman farmer."
I thought I'd plant trees, raise a few sheep and goats, and harvest
an orchard of apple trees.
Since I knew diddly about farming,
I bought a few issues of the Irish Farmer's Journal just to get
me pointed in the right direction. I was expecting articles about
sheep breeds and housing requirements. You know - farming stuff.
What I found, though, was a magazine
devoted to strange acronyms - CAP and Top Up Headers and Ewe
Premiums. I rapidly discerned that these were all arcane European
Economic Community programmes designed to channel money to farmers
who followed a specified set of rules and filed a requisite number
of papers with the proper authorities.
Irish farmers, I learned, seemed
to be principally engaged in the business of farming for grants!
The Whinge
Farm organisations were the first to grasp the importance of European funding and rapidly perfected a style of grantsmanship known as The Whinge.
The style was perfectly summed up when the head of Ireland's leading farming organisation stumbled from a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture a few years back in total shock. The farmers had been given every single pound and shilling they had asked for and the man was clearly at a loss for words when a reporter thrust a microphone into his face to ask his impressions. "Well, I can't deny that farmers did well by this meeting. But…" And then he immediately launched into a whine about how a new programme was needed to address needs not yet met.
After moving to Ireland I lived for a time on a modern Irish dairy farm and I soon learned that though European grants were part of the system, a lot of hard work and careful attention to animals was the real story.
But, the impression among the public is that farmers are a load of funding junkies, that their complaints aren't really justified, that they are the little lads who cry "Wolf!"
Down on the Farm Decoupling
Whinge ad nauseam, the fact is that farming is in decline throughout Ireland. I live in a rural, farming parish. For the past decade I've watched as one neighbour after another retired from farming and those remaining work ever bigger holdings.
My parish reflects a nationwide pattern. From 1991 to 2002 agriculture fell from 14pc of the workforce to 5pc. Meanwhile, existing farm sizes have increased. My own county of Waterford has the largest farms in the nation, averaging 45 hectares, about 100 acres. The national average is now 80 acres. In the US, by contrast, farms of 1,300 acres are regarded as barely viable. What keeps the remaining farmers in business is a lot of hard work and, until now, that complex system of subsidies and payments from the EU.
The rules governing these EU grants have changed substantially. They call this "decoupling" and the basic idea is that payments will not be based on production but on the number of acres a farmer holds. So long as minimal environmental standards are met, farmers will get paid whether they produce enough to feed an African nation or only their pet dog. The hope is that overproduction with its overpayments and environmental costs such as nitrate runoffs, overstocking and erosion can be cut.
As we head through 2007, the programme has had some discernible results. Part time farmers have signed up en masse for programmes that work to conserve and protect the native landscape. Hedges, ditches, fens and wild places are protected by a voluntary system that rewards farmers with increased grants. 60,000 farmers have signed up.
But... the remaining full time farmers are operating at ever higher levels of industrial output. Market conditions are forcing them to concentrate on efficiency. Environmental regulations are tighter, but the pressures on some lands are more intense than ever.
The ultimate goal is a better environment AND a more free farming system where individuals can make choices based not on arcane grant requirements but on actual market conditions. The jury is still out.
Life on a Farm
That's the big picture, but life
on a typical small farm is still enthralling. My family and I
lived for six months on an Irish dairy farm. Each day centered
around the morning and evening milking. Into the milking shed
came these vast, filthy animals with mucky tails and hooves that
had trod through unmentionable droppings. But, each teat was
cleaned, hooked up to sterilized stainless steel milking machines,
and the whole place constantly hozed down and disinfected. Farmers
are paid according to the quality of the milk, and they can lose
a lot of money if the bacterial count goes up.
Young grass grows faster and
has an average of 4 to 6% more protein than older grass, so the
farmers often fence the cows into small sections of pasture.
This forces the animals to graze tightly down to the base of
the grass. This in turn encourages rapid regrowth of the highly
desirable young grass. The cows rotate all season long from one
bright green salad bowl to the next.
A more disconcerting modern practice
is the regular visit by the vet. My two girls were fascinated
when the vet showed up to give the pregnant cows sonograms. Even
more fascinating was watching him check some of the bovine lovelies
by plunging his arm nearly shoulder deep into the cows' anal
opening. The girls couldn't believe their eyes and right then
decided that careers in veterinary medicine lacked appeal.
During the early spring calving
season, the dairy farmer dances attendance on his herd, ready
to help out if the laboring mama-to-be needs assistance. We once
visited a neighbor with a cow about to have a calf. We arrived
exactly at the moment of birth. Another 20 seconds and we would
have missed it. The farmer had to drag by brute strength the
struggling calf's legs from the cow. My youngest daughter was
freaked! The calf was a sight, what with afterbirth and blood
and umbilical cord draped all over her. And then the mother ate
the afterbirth! My eldest, very scientific, explained that she
had read animals eat the afterbirth to help cover up the scent
from predators.
This dairy farm's web site can
be viewed by clicking
here. There is a growing Irish Farm Ring of farming web sites.
The key farming organisations and their websites are listed below.
For something totally different, here are my
own thoughts on Irish grass.
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