The land area of Ireland is 6.9 million hectares: 4.3 million hectares is used for agriculture and 700,000 hectares for forestry.
Seventy-nine per cent of agricultural area is devoted to grass (3.4 million hectares), 11 per cent to rough grazing (0.5 million hectares), and 10 per cent to crop production (0.4 million hectares), though this will fall this year with the demise of the sugar industry.
Beef and milk production currently account for 55 per cent of agricultural output, based on producer prices.
Agricultural land is divided into 135,000 farms, but because there are more farms than farmers, it is estimated that this year there are about 125,000 people who describe themselves as farmers.
Ireland has comparatively large farms compared with the rest of the EU, with the average holding at just over 32 hectares.
We have some of the oldest farmers in the EU and yet one of the highest levels of young farmers, with 11 per cent of our farmers aged under 35 years old and 42 per cent aged over 55 years old.
Teagasc's National Farm Survey of 2004 estimated that on 52 per cent of farms the holder and/or spouse had an off-farm job and that on 78 per cent of farms either the farmer or spouse had some source of off-farm income, either from employment, pension or social welfare. The increase in part-time farming (some say it is as high as 70 per cent this year) has been dramatic since then as employment, especially in construction, has gone up.
Most farmers who are not in dairying (which is labour-intensive) can rear beef cattle or sheep and hold down a full-time job, and this trend has been growing, especially since the EU broke the link between direct payments to farmers and production in 2005.
Since December last, Ireland's farmers have received direct payments of more than €2 billion. €€1.6 billion was due to them in 2005, but there was a backlog of payments, which brought the total up to €2.4 billion.
Few Irish farmers could survive on what the income from their land could deliver, and without the direct subsidies from Europe, fewer than 25,000 of them could make it as full-time farmers.
We could have fewer than 10,000 dairy farmers in the year 2015 from the current 24,000.
The same is also true of the beef sector, especially now that farmers do not have to keep stock to qualify for the direct aid from Brussels, awarded now in a single payment based on what farmers produced in a three-year period at the start of this century.
We are not about to see an end to farming in Ireland. What has been happening is that fewer people using smarter technologies and operating in larger units will continue to produce the same amount of beef, milk and sheep meat that we have been doing over the past decade. Smaller operators will continue to work their farms on a part-time basis and when their single farm payments run out they will sell sites, a lucrative aspect of the farming sector over the past decade.
Real and dramatic changes in agriculture will kick in by 2013, when the farm payments from the EU run out.
We produce the 1.1 billion gallons of milk we are allowed to produce under the EU quota system, the 500,000 tonnes of beef we have traditionally reared, and the national sheep herd, though falling in numbers, is expected to stabilise.