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

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.

“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.

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.

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