Angus Woods: Abandoned productive farmers paying a levy for nothing

Wicklow is a small agricultural county so it is normal and expected to travel to our larger neighbors for informational meetings. It has been a few years since we had the privilege of hosting a large farm gathering in this county.

Trying to organize large public farmers’ meetings has always been difficult, especially when they were held in March in a county like Carlow, which is famous for hardworking farmers.

The difficulty increases as calving, lambing and sowing are high on everyone’s priority list.

Many farmers in Carlow and surrounding counties will suffer financial losses as a result of Secretary Charlie McConalogue’s CAP reforms, so I expected a good turnout that evening.

Previous reforms would have seen packed venues with passionate crowds raised and ready for anyone to propose anything that would have a negative financial impact on their farms.

There would have been a sense of electricity and loud chatter in the audience before the sessions began.

Not this time.

There was no problem finding a parking space and what struck me was the silence in the room. About 150 were in attendance and spread well around the room. No buzzing in the corridor or lobby. Even allowing for the Covid effect, it was really quite spooky.

The department had six speakers on duty, each of whom presented their specialist areas briefly but in detail. When they were finished, the assembly was opened to questions and opinions from the floor.

Much of what has been presented as the future of Irish agriculture for the next five years will result in reduced production. However, Minister McConalogue has urged productive farmers to increase tillage, which was mentioned several times during the Q&A. Somewhat contradictory political positions.

The cuts being made in the McConalogue reform affecting the productive farmers present at the meeting are not the first. They come on top of the earlier convergence that comes on top of the SPS cuts in the Ciolos reforms.

Farmers in Carlow suffered more than any other county when former Agriculture Secretary Mary Coughlan oversaw the closure of Ireland’s sugar beet sector, with the compensation beet farmers receiving being included in their individual SPS over a seven-year period.

Sugar beets were a crucial component in their crop rotations and their most profitable crop. A vibrant sector that has been shut down to make way for sugar imports into the EU.

At the meeting, the lack of representation of agricultural organizations was very noticeable. One of the most productive parts of the country is facing massive challenges, and there have been no signs of Presidents or MPs, resource chairs, executives or board members (with the exception of Francie Gorman). The district chairs were strangely silent.

I wondered what exactly are hardworking, productive farmers paying a levy for? The levy system could always be justified if the IFA had a sound CAP policy that supported production from the start of the CAP discussions. This did not happen with this CAP reform.

The reason given by IFA staff and senior elected leaders was that they had more winners than losers on convergence, frontloading and environmental programs.

The ridiculous convoys of tractors at the end of the CAP negotiations, urging the government to sit down and speak to the IFA when concrete demands and proposals should have been the cause of any protests, showed their inability to adequately represent productive farmers.

The 2015 Teagasc study, which shows that 40 percent of farms have a total yield of less than €8,000 per year, points to the difficulties of developing policies that favor production.

According to the study, at least 52,000 farms do not rely on agricultural production – they rely on off-farm income.

The move away from defending production makes the levy vulnerable and difficult to justify, particularly by the productive dry livestock and arable sectors, which rely heavily on direct payments to compete with non-EU imports and intensively farmed white meat.

As the number of full-time farmers falls and there is a lack of young people entering the sector, the number of agricultural votes is also falling.

Productive farmers need good representation more than ever as the number of farming votes dwindles and politicians look for areas where they can collect votes more quickly and easily.

It’s hard to see where those who are losing heavily again on this CAP reform can get the support they need, and the sense of defeat was evident listening to good, hard-working, productive farmers after the meeting. It was a sense of abandonment that was so sad to hear.

Angus Woods is a drywall builder in Co Wicklow.