07.30.06
Is the country happy for the small farm to wither and die?
My occasional doubts about the wisdom of moving back to the country have vanished. The fine weather has left the young trees thirsty, but we can water guilt-free from our own well. The sun means the making of hay and early harvest are a joy for the women and children, if hard work for the men. Sandwiches are brought to the fields with flasks of tea; I proudly produce gooseberry tarts each evening. The children are ecstatic with all the activity.My businessman father can’t be got off his vintage tractors. “Old tractor as hobby” is temporarily replaced by “old tractor doing important work”. He is revitalised and filled with nostalgia for his childhood (and mine) when saving hay and harvesting crops brought a sense of achievement and relief.
Of course this flurry of farming activity is just a large-scale hobby in itself. Small farms like ours stopped paying their way a long time ago. The pretence was maintained for a while, when cheques in the post were linked to production and “headage”.
It seems such a quaint concept now. Produce sheep, cattle, milk or grain and sell it. You didn’t get an economic price at the market, but the EU topped you up depending on the numbers. The link has now been broken and the cheque in the post bears no relation to production or activity on the land. Instead it is linked to acreage. So you can go for broke and farm intensively, or take the cheque and try your hand at something else. Depending on who you believe either 40% (Central Statistics Office) or 68% (Teagasc) of farmers are ” earning “off-farm income”. In other words, a job that pays.
As well as the single-payment system there is the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme. This is 75% funded by the EU and 25% by the Irish taxpayer and its purpose is to reward those who farm in an environmentally friendly manner. Being in REPS gets you another cheque for working in a way that is at odds with economic practice.
So, herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers are banned around hedgerows and water sources and the “visual appearance” of the farm must be improved.
Since us Careys were messy farmers (you know, gates tied up with twine) improving our visual appearance has been an effort. But the results are pleasing, both to the wildlife and to us: it’s easier to open gates that hang properly. The hope is that endangered species such as the corncrake will make a comeback.
The last thing governments want farmers to do is produce something. Instead their role has become custodians of the countryside.
Last week Michael Love, a friend of my father’s and a proper farmer, harvested his oats and left a few strips for the vintage-tractor enthusiasts. My father and his friends cut the oats and bound them into sheaves with their old machines. The rest of us went for the spectacle and since the men who keep up these practices are of considerable vintage themselves, I suspect there won’t be many more opportunities.
The real farmer who facilitates this play-acting is trying to do things on an economic basis. You wonder how long he can keep it up. He asked my father to make sure the sheaves were removed quickly because the field will be ploughed up and a second crop planted next week. It’s high-risk and hard work, and while he’ll keep it going, his children hardly will. The Teagasc farm income report for 2004 showed that only 10% of farms in Ireland had an income of more than €40,000, while 40% had an income of €6,500 or less.
With numbers like this, what will the future look like? Will a big rancher buy up all the little farms when the current generation dies out? There will be efficiency and best practice and plenty of fertiliser, but no hedgerows. Maybe nobody will care. City slickers keep complaining about the farmers being paid to “do nothing” and talk about the consumer demand for organic produce. Maybe giving birds a place to nest is doing nothing, but it’s a shame not to.
Nor do we see much of this demand for organic produce. People may like organic food, but they also want it cheap. They want carrots that look big, plump and are all the same size – not skinny with the sizes mixed up. Consumers have also lost the concept of seasonality. If you want locally produced food, then you have to accept that at certain times of the year you can’t get certain products. May and June were always disastrous for potatoes. You had to wait till Easter to get the rhubarb and July to get the berries.
But people want all food all year. So supermarkets secure contracts for asparagus from Peru, where it grows all year, rather than from the local farmer who can provide it from April to June. The herbs come from Israel. The potatoes from Italy. Food production is globalised because that’s what people want. They may say it’s the result of evil governments and greedy corporations, but it’s merely supply meeting demand.
Health and safety regulations tend to be the final straw for optimistic farmers who dream of selling their produce locally. Our local black market in eggs has so far evaded the clutches of whatever agency is in charge of ensuring “safe” eggs. We buy ours in a shop where they are literally kept under the counter. They are deposited by an industrious farmer’s wife with ne’er a “best before” date in sight. My city-based in-laws are horrified and insist that we will get salmonella.
The urban-rural divide extends beyond location and psychology to food. Eventually, the hobby farmers and the people in REPS will die out. The likes of us can hold onto our large gardens or small plot of land and grow our own fruit and vegetable and swap produce between ourselves. The urban masses will buy their food in supermarkets cheap and utterly lacking in nutrition. Some farmers will earn a few quid from selling fruit and veg in markets around the country while their wives bring in real money from real jobs. In the meantime, the big guys will have to get bigger or sell up.
You just wonder how long it will take and what Ireland will look like when the hedges are gone. It won’t cost the taxpayer any money any more, but there will be a cost. I hope we are ready to pay it.
simon said,
July 30, 2006 at 2:50 pm
god dahm eu are in the hands of the big gate corporations
Ray said,
July 31, 2006 at 9:36 am
I’m confused.
Surely if ‘real farming’ returns – with headage payments and subsidies, maybe, definitely with fertilisers and pesticides – then that will see the growth of the super-farms and the end of hedgerows? If you have to make your money from the farm, then you need efficiency and best practice – which means large-scale monoculture.
If the EU is paying people just to have the land, and paying them more to preserve the hedgerows, and they can be hobby farmers and weekend farmers without having to make their living from it, doesn’t that make them _more_ likely to hang on to their small farms?
You say the government wants the farmers to be custodians of the countryside, but do you mean that as a good or a bad thing?
ben said,
July 31, 2006 at 10:21 am
We trendy “city slickers” can’t win for trying. Here I was, seeking out local, sustainably-grown and farmed food whenever I could find it and afford it. Now it turns out that by doing so I’ve been destroying hedgerows, humiliating elderly widowers, and stalking corncrakes in their autumnal barley fields to savagely end their metallic croaking call in a blur of tawney feathers and blood.
Please tell me I didn’t gas any badgers. Meles culpa.
tom said,
July 31, 2006 at 12:47 pm
It’s a strange situation when you get paid money for owning land isn’t it?
Daniel K. said,
July 31, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Sarah, we let the hunters go and now it just seems to be time for the gatherers too.
ben said,
July 31, 2006 at 7:26 pm
I wonder if the proud independent midlands farmers of Fine Gael could just provide a once-and-for-all list of how much subsidy they believe is their entitlement by birth and then stop adding to it. Headage payments for animals, headage payments for children, subsidies for nonproductive land, subsidies for productive land. Out of the PAYE worker’s pocket, into the till at “Foundation”. Work for a living? Sell goods and services at the market rate? Heavens, no! That’s for poor people and those horrible “city slickers”. Leave the money in the usual spot and shuffle away deferentially please.
Sarah said,
July 31, 2006 at 7:36 pm
I don’t think I advocated any particular position. I simply observed the inevitability. Even with single payments and REPS, when the current generation of farmers die, there is little likelihood of those farms being farmed in the same way. There will be consolidation, the hedgerows will disappear and for the forseeable future organic market farming will remain a fringe activity. I think REPS is a great system and it will help many of the small farmers to keep going (which I think is good to answer Ray’s point) and perhaps fund some of the sons and daughters to keep going too. But, a way of life is dying out. It’s kinda sad. And not great for the environment.
I also hoped to point out to some people that holding all of the following positions is inconsistent:
- production based subsidies are a joke
- acreage based subsidies are a joke
- you shouldn’t pay farmers anything – they should deal with an open market like everyone else
- food should be cheap
- my favourite varieties of fruit and veg should be available every single day all year round at the supermarket
- fruit and veg should contain no GM alteration, have been in contact with no pesticide and should be completely safe all the time or I am suing
- birds and cute rabbits and foxes should have nice, safe habitats
- little fields with lots of hedges and pretty trees should never be cut down – the tourists won’t like it. Ireland should look like Ireland.
pete said,
July 31, 2006 at 11:50 pm
So, how much are these acreage-based subsidies? Could I get a mortgage, buy land, then use the subsidies to make the mortgage payments? How much subsidy would my average suburban garden qualify for, enough to pay someone to cut the grass maybe?
tom said,
August 1, 2006 at 9:24 am
here’s the list of your statements that most people would actually agree with:
- production based subsidies are a joke
- acreage based subsidies are a joke
- you shouldn’t pay farmers anything – they should deal with an open market like everyone else
- birds and cute rabbits and foxes should have nice, safe habitats
- little fields with lots of hedges and pretty trees should never be cut down – the tourists won’t like it. Ireland should look like Ireland.
the obvious answer is to nationalise the land and have salaried park keepers. Ireland would be MORE beautiful, the taxpayer would take ownership of the asset that they are paying to maintain, and we would buy our food from places that have a competitive advantage in producing it (and that could do with the money).
ben said,
August 1, 2006 at 10:38 am
The obvious logic of Tom’s idea is demonstrated by the fact that Sarah’s family are out playing silly buggers pretending to do it. That’s what the punters want: hares, foxes, deer, badgers, corncrakes, oat-riggs, corn-riggs and barley-riggs and corn-riggs are bonnie, sloes, blackberries, castles, baileys. Yes. All of that. Ireland can provide that at a much higher mark-up than she can tonnes of wheat.
If you demand money because you hold land, then you don’t get to decide to do with that land anymore. If you’re getting a subvention to leave land idle, you should damn well have heather and plantains and orchids and bog cotton and natterjack toads and haws and goldfinches and hares and otters and pied wagtails and meadow pippets. Corncrakes, too. In Ogham. If you are just feeding your feckin’ bullocks in that field and on the sly the way every other lying cute hoor culchie fucker does, then you should not get a cent.
Sarah said,
August 1, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Tom that’s silly. That would cost a fortune. If the taxpayer wants to pay then it would be cheaper to just pay the farmers more instead of buying the land and then paying someone else to do the same job..
And Ben, these things are quite tightly controlled. There are inspections. If ANYTHING is out of place you don’t get the money. So you can rest easy
tom said,
August 1, 2006 at 2:37 pm
I said nothing about “buying” the land Sarah.
As a compromise I suppose landowners could be given a choice. Either keep the land in private ownership and receive no subsidy (this would obviously be the choice of the typical homeowner), or surrender the land to the state and be freed of any obligation to maintain it, other than in the context of a salaried position, which of course you would have to apply for.
jimbobs said,
August 1, 2006 at 8:14 pm
What on earth is this article about? What are we going to lose when people who own land zoned for agrciulture finally stop pretending to be farmers? We all know the number one farming crop these days is isolated housing, a further subsidy- this time to the children of people who pretend to farm.
“Is the country happy for the small farm to wither and die?” yes indeedy, will it be shown on pay-per-view?
What possible sympathy do you think Irish people have for farmers? This group of poor mouth actors will get 1.6 billion in direct subsidies this year and god knows how much indirectly through intervention price support, export refunds and import tariffs. The high price food policy is a regressive tax on the poor while export refunds and import tariffs contribute to 3rd world poverty.
What do we get in return? A profession that divides its time between poisoning the land and rivers with fertilisers to grow low grade food nobody wants, drugging animals (except those they keep for their own familes) and arming itself against people who might dare to tread on their land.
Nobody believes the declared farm incomes.
gerry said,
August 2, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I haven’t heard anyone making an argument for the collectivisation of the land since the heady days of Ceaucescu.
The IFA needs to do a little PR here – does every city dweller believe that farmers sit at home rolling up fat joints of illegally grown hemp with 50 euro notes that they collect by wheelbarrow every week from the post office? Small working farms are important or the countryside will become like England’s – denuded of any local life and a second home haven bereft of any local colour.
Bridget said,
March 5, 2007 at 8:42 am
Well, my family and I are experiencing a lot of nonsense, with no help from anyone. We are struggling along, we have the house, with a large mortgage bills, to clear off. We are trying to get established as a dairy goat herd, but of course there is money available for Cows, sheep, horses, and people under 35 and people with land. But when you are broke, trying to raise a family and really struggling, no help is available. We are currently building portable sheds in our back garden, using fencing panels, lumber and 2nd hand cladding. We have some of our foundation stock. We were able to use the field beside us, but now my brother wants us out of it – so we are rushing to build in the back of our house. ! Im the only one married with 4 children and we are trying to get established so that the kids will always have something to come and work with if employment gets bad or the two youngest with the dyspraxia can’t get a job they are happy with. It sucks when you are trying to get ahead – but unless you have a huge acreage, lots of money, Teagasc, the Agricultural department, etc, will not help. Personally, both myself and My hubs as well as the kids enjoy the goats, and from all the research – we are importing a large percentage of the milk since there is nowhere near enough goats in the country to produce the amount needed, it is a viable project, but people cant get past the image of goats. We have about 700 a week going out for bills out of a 850 paycheque before we buy groceries, hay, and diesel for the car. Don’t tell me about the government forcing the small farmers out, they are not even helping those of us trying to get started in. Im 41, a woman, and I grew up on a farm, yes I was away for 20 years, but I have done the Goat course with Teagasc. I think its discrimination of some kind. I mean you have to be 35 or younger? I might as well say I am breeding rats to let out in a housing estate as saying that I want to breed dairy goats and sell the milk to companies like Glenisk and the cheesemakers.
Bridget said,
March 5, 2007 at 8:51 am
Oh yes – we also dont have a 2nd home, and we were seeking to lease land from our tax rebate when we get it – hubs paye. But guess what – even though we would be bringing our animals home at night and not leaving them out on raining days – but one farmer who had acreage beside us said no to the goats! We would have been using the electric fence – as well. He would rather leave it idle or have it dug up than lease it to the likes of us. Yes I am disgusted with a lot of these farmers as well as the government who will not encourage anyone. When Danone owns 37% of Glenisk, and they have to import so much milk and they are going to be looking for 3 million litres of Goats milk next year, and the cheesemakers can’t get enough milk either, why isnt there any encouragement or better publicity. No you have to be a big farmer with loads of money and machinery and such, and what happens – the government throws the money at you! Pisses me off big time when we are struggling to put electricity in the meter so we can do the wash up and keep the lights on and we are working and putting hay in the mangers, and changing water etc till late at night. Yes we enjoy the animals, but it would be nice if some help was given to us till we got established. 1-2 years I estimate, instead of the big cattle, sheep farmers.
Cleona Wallace said,
March 19, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I’m just wondering if there’s much in the way of vegetable box schemes over in Ireland? I’m from the UK (but will be moving to Cork in the next couple of years with my fiance who’s Irish), so it is partly a selfish enquiry. But I do think that the popularity of vegetable boxes in the UK (and I think in the US they have them also) is a way for consumers to avoid buying veggies flown in from far afield.
Sarah said,
March 20, 2007 at 11:57 am
Never heard of them! How does that work? We do have a little “country market” where some local farmers bring produce – but I warn you this is not like the markets in France. You might go down and see a few beetroot some leeks and the odd carrot.
Justin said,
March 20, 2007 at 12:23 pm
(yay for the comments feed!)
there are a couple of good box schemes in Dublin, at least, so there’s almost deffo one in Cork since they can’t resist copying us
The one we were on was really good, but a bit monotonous, since they pick the veggies — lots of coleslaw was being made, let’s put it that way. Once we move (soon) we’ll be trying the other bunch.
Parttimefarmer said,
July 16, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I’ve noticed a lot of idiocy and ignorance on this thread that is quite astounding. In order to understand the way the countryside has ended up there are 2 basic things that need to be understood. a. the postwar imperative for food security and b. One of the major underpinnings of an urban industrialised economy Cheap food
The introduction of subsidies was done to ensure food security by ensuring that farmers were subsidised based on production the eu ensured that rpoduction increased and food was secured, if product could not be sold on the open market it was sold into intervention and stored thus ensuring food security.
Food needs to be cheap in order that an urban based economy works, i.e. if people spend the majority of their cash on food they wont be able to afford housing in cities, if food isnt cheap you wont be able to transport it to the big cities and sell it through several layers of suppliers packagers and supermarkets, if food isnt cheap people wont be able to buy into the consumerism with the cars the home entertainment systems and the holidays which barely make their work long hours kids in childcare, dont know your neighbours have no sense of community lifestyle barely tolerable
Headage subsidies made the food cheap as over producing farmers could afford to sell at a loss because they had the subsidy in their pocket. buying into intervention when prices were really low means that the following year when their was a price hike , instead of allowing the farmer to reap the benefit intervention stock were released onto the market and the price was back down again. The trouble was it became a victim of its own success, production got so high that there were no lean years, qoutas were introduced but production was too high at that stage and there was still too much food, then they decided to divorce subsidies from production, that did the trick production went down, then what happened? no food stocks a few bad harvests, move by investors from shares and property into commodities and hey presto world food crisis.
Getting back to the crisis in rural ireland and the demise of the small farmer is singularly down to this intervention whilst initially it looked like it was there to keep prices up it wasnt, and because larger and larger proprtions of farm incomes were coming from subsidies farmers thought ‘Id be shagged if it wasnt for the subsidy’ but the reality was that the reason proces were so depressed was because of the CAP policy in the first place and it became a cascade of events a monster that fed itself. Everytime there was an upset in the market the farmers demanded their income be protected, everytime a subsidy was threatened with removal they guarded it like a cornered animal.
Whilst all of this was going on the farmers of newzealand, south america and africa were kept out of the european market with tarriffs and qoutas, Therefore in order to compete they had to get even cheaper, what happend? their farmers merged got bigger and more efficient,
When tarriffs were slowly removed that put even more pressure on irish farmers who were expected to compete but on top of this they had to meet higher and higher standards because the bureaucrats expected to get something in return for their money, oh and consumer safety.
What has happened now is that food shortages and fuel crops have made farming on a medium scale semi-viable again which is probably only prolonging the agony. If we continue to build cities and live unsustainably all farms will have to get to the same scale as Argentina, Brazil and the US in order to feed the population, it may take another couple of hundred years but it is either that, or a stabilisation of the world population or starvation for a large number of people.
Generally mothernature usually looks after these things in one way or another, a world war a natural disaster a pandemic, something will happen in the next 100 years which will decimate the world population and bring things back to a a more sustainable growth rate.
I am not preaching, I have my laptop my car my house and my tv and my foreign holiday, I need cheap food as much as the next man but all of these things are interconnected and everything happens for a reason and we need to decide if this is what we are buying into or is their another way
To the goat farmers who are having trouble setting up without a subsidy or a grant in sight, stick with it your better off not to be beholden to any of them, how will they be able to enforce cross compliance if they have no grant to withdraw from you.
This is not farmer greed or a major conspiracy to erode the farming way of life, it is an inevitable consequence of growth based economics i.e. in order to stand still the economy still has to grow and in order for the economy to grow you need cheap food.
End of rant, this was all off the cuff and not fully thought out and I’m sure there are loads of holes in my arguments but I am still right