I milk cows to make a living. I’m also a staunch environmentalist. I am an ardent advocate for climate action, biodiversity, food sovereignty. And last year, I crossed enemy lines to start work as a milker to support myself while I was studying sustainable horticulture and permaculture at Kinsale College. This often earns a few raised eyebrows from the environmental set. Usually, I neglect to mention my worldview to the farmers that I work for at all.
Both groups are somewhat exclusive, with specific slang and ways of dressing. Natural fibres and flora-based tattoos abound in the permaculture world. So-called normies might struggle to fit in. Similar confusion occurs when I tell agricultural people that I’m not from a farming background. For many, this does not compute. Does a supermarket cashier need to have a long lineage of till operators in their ancestry to succeed at their job?
The Greens, Eamon Ryan, hippies, tree-huggers and environmentalists are public enemies numbers one through five in the world of agriculture. Meanwhile, farmers are often maligned in the media and looked down upon by the middle classes, who still seem to like their artisanal cheeses. In each camp, the narrative is the same: the other side doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s not quite as simple as this.
Government policy pushes for increases in farm efficiency and yields. Increased yields mean a greater potential for export and a boost for the GDP. The message to farmers is do what you’re told, and you get your subsidy payment.
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For some time, the rhetoric has been: expand, clear land and hedgerows, spray more herbicides, spread more artificial fertilisers and slurry. Like most businesspeople, farmers want to increase profit margins. Other industries, however, aren’t vilified when they do so. How many column inches are given to pressuring multinationals to offset their emissions? Society’s pursuit of indefinite economic growth no matter what is ultimately the cause of this mess.
Of course, nature is not an indefinite resource and thus cannot support indefinite growth. Eventually, as the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will accumulate, temperatures increase, sea levels rise, water becomes more scarce, and people and places in other parts of the world that we now depend on to produce a lot of our food – including fruit, vegetables, legumes, grains, oils and also animal feed – will cease to exist.
It is easy for the suburban armchair environmentalist to point fingers at farmers for damage to the environment but that shows a lack of critical thinking. That same self-professed foodie is benefiting from this low-cost food model. The system that keeps food prices low has brought us to this crisis point. Low prices have pushed farming to becoming more and more intensive. Razor-thin margins in other types of farming has sparked an exodus into dairy, where there’s money to be made. Farmers are merely a link in the chain of entities trying to make as much money as possible. Equally culpable is the consumer trying to pay as little as possible for their food. Don’t point the finger if the other four are tapping the credit card that props the system up.
Farmers are a small cog in a big wheel susceptible to intense external pressures, including the Department of Agriculture, EU policy, Teagasc. They are individuals who don’t hold the same sway as the corporations whose taxes fill the public coffers. It’s much easier to dictate to them.
When will policymakers stand up for the people who produce the nation’s food? It is this bigger picture that environmentalists and farmers alike need to unite on. Perhaps if Government policy meant that middlemen paid a fairer price for the produce they bought, farming wouldn’t be such an extractive, resource-intensive industry. Farmers want to see more nature on their farms and don’t want to be polluting rivers and lakes. I’d imagine they’d prefer to have fewer cows and produce less methane if their pay was steady and commensurate with the work.
The farmers I’ve worked for do not drink the milk that they produce. Granted, taken straight from the tank, it isn’t pasteurised, but it is easily done if the motivation is there. Currently, they are selling it for about 42c per litre then buying it back from the supermarket at anywhere up to four times the cost. This is the case in point: the person (and their family usually) who does all the hard graft to produce the food gets one-third or one-quarter of the price of it.
Then they pay the creamery truck driver to collect the milk, take it to the processing plant, have them pasteurise and homogenise it, package it, pay someone in the advertising team to put up a social media post about it. After that another driver takes it to a supermarket-distribution centre, where another driver takes it to the retailer, and the CEO gets a fat cheque to run it all. Then the farmer puts fuel in their car to drive to the shop where they’ll hand over their hard-earned money to buy it in a plastic container which they’ll have to pay to dispose of. It sums up the food system quite well – it is simply nonsensical.
Milk prices boomed last year, but prices are steadily dropping now. Yet, the farmer still has the same amount of work to do. They also have the same expenses. They don’t have any scope to negotiate a different price, as the milk processor sets this. Would you sign up to work every day of the year, every year, like the average dairy farmer? If you work in healthcare, you might have to work on Christmas Day, but you get a day off in lieu. The farmer will most definitely be working on December 25th but without any extra remuneration.
Of course, it suits those in power that we squabble between ourselves. Farmer versus environmentalist, urban versus rural. It would be rather more uncomfortable for them if instead we focused our energy on holding the Government to account for presiding over this unbridled capitalistic system. Nobody wants to be remembered as responsible for the environmental degradation that will ultimately make the planet inhospitable for our grandchildren.
It was heartening this week to see Macra na Feirme’s march to the Dáil from Athy. The plight of being a young person in an increasingly desolate rural Ireland, devoid of services or even a place to live needs to be brought to the fore. I might contact them to join the club. I wonder if they’ll have me.
Sarah Coonan is a psychology graduate who has spent the last five years learning about growing food, climate change and biodiversity at Cloughjordan Ecovillage and studying Permaculture at Kinsale College.