In 2025 Agri-tourism is Ireland's biggest industry, and farmers survive by growing oil-producing crops. Seán Mac Connell, Agriculture Correspondent, on the future of rural Ireland
It's a wet Saturday evening in January 2025 and the village pub is packed. It is a clean and quiet environment and the best seat in the pub is occupied by one of the biggest farmers in the west. She employs nearly 2,000 people on her 40-square mile farm. Her partner and son are abroad, supplying Europe with vital fuel and food. It has been a profitable time.
Inside the pub, not a lot has changed. The big farmer is still the most important person in the area, but outside, the rural landscape has changed dramatically. Farming had been in decline up to 2015 when Brussels fully implemented its plan to cut the links between EU supports and production.
The number of farmers in the country has dropped from around 135,000 at the beginning of the Millennium to less than 12,000 full-time farmers who supply milk and cereals. Supplying beef, sheep and vegetables, are 20,000 part-timers.
The numbers of people involved in farming also dropped dramatically and many farmers who had believed the single compensation payment they received annually was additional to what they might expect from the markets, found they had no future.
Many of them were able to retire, however, on a combination of grants for afforestation. Careful husbandry of the Single Payment cheques helped. They leased their land to younger and better resourced people.
But the main problem farmers faced was the absolute demand from Europe that they reverse the damage they had been inflicting on the environment from the early 1970s. The EU's Nitrate Directive, implemented in 2006, was the first of many restraints imposed on farmers. Many decided that living within the limits of the fertilisers they could use was not worth it.
Food consumption became more globalised. Cheaply produced food from under-developed countries dominated the world markets. Produce cheaply or go out of business, was the demand.
Farmers in the first world could not compete and, cushioned by their compensatory cheque, they retired. Large tracts of Europe, including Ireland, were allowed to go wild. Urban Europe rejoiced and funded the decline.
Some landowners were able to survive by selling sites to urban people who wanted to move out of overcrowded towns. Farmers now exploit the "public goods" element of their farms; the view, the clean air, the walks, the recreational outlets. Agri-tourism is the largest industry in the State.
Livestock production declined across the island, now governed by four regional parliaments, which elect representatives to a national assembly based on population levies, and which sits in Athlone.
One sector, however, failed to be caught up in the decline. About 5,000 Irish tillage farmers, who were never large landowners but rented their lands, stayed in business.
Over the 1990s they became the best cereal farmers in the world, producing the highest yields from their cereal crops. They reinforced their position over the first two decades of 2000.
As the pressure on fossil fuels continued, they diversified and began to use the same technologies on sugar beet and oilseed rape to meet the demands from Europe that alternative energy sources be found. The change to the oil-producing crops coincided with climatic changes which boosted even further the yields the farmers had achieved in the previous three decades.
Meanwhile, a growing alternative-energy movement was successfully promoting the use of biomass fuels as an alternative to the diminishing levels of available fossil fuels.
Wheat and beet fields now dominate the 2025 landscape and where cereals cannot grow, forests and shrublands provide biomass from willow and other trees. Energy crops are being grown on huge farms now being supported again by grants from Europe. Livestock production is now indoors to free up energy cropping for the Irish. Ireland was lucky on many scores. Global warming increased the mean temperature to a point where even grapes could be grown anywhere on the island, not just on a line below Dublin and Galway, as was the case up to then.
Higher wind-velocity since 2020 has made wind-farms more lucrative and many landowners have turned to wind generating as a source of income.
Following a decade of decline, farmers suddenly find themselves very much in demand again as political unrest has made food deliveries from across the globe less certain. People rely more and more on their local producers for organic and conventionally produced food.
As fossil-fuel prices climbed beyond the reach of most folk, inventive people turned to gas production from animal waste and energy from crops to fuel their homes and vehicles and governments began to limit ownership of private vehicles.
The importance of the energy input once again has propelled farmers, for nearly a century a minority in rural Ireland, to a place of prominence again and back to the heady days of the 1960s when they ended all logical argument about their role with the words, "You can't live without the auld farmer and his spud."