Sir, – The abundance of high-quality, cheap food in the western world allows for commentary about its production methods, as in the statement that “The ideology that drives agriculture in Ireland today is unsustainable” (Letters, September 2nd).
What’s never articulated is the policy or “ideology” that will secure food production, guarantee a profitable livelihood for producers and utilise land in a way that also generates a long-term and ongoing return for land owners.
The average herd size in Irish dairy farms is 80 cows on 85 acres. The average suckler farm size is 14 cows. There are less than 280 commercial pig farms operating in Ireland, with declining numbers of horticultural and tillage farms.
The vast majority of farms in Ireland are family farms with the “ideology” that drives them being to make sufficient profit to rear and educate a family. Due to the ever-increasing input costs, stagnant profits, labour shortages, climate change and production cuts due to environment restrictions, there are few new entrants to farming.
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With 57 years being the average age of Irish farmers and the dearth of new entrants, the “ideology” of Irish agriculture is being shaped by factors outside its control.
It’s true that 25 per cent of livestock supplies to factories now come from feedlots owned and operated by the factory owners or their agents, mimicking the US model where corporations own thousands of acres of intensive tillage land and enormous beef fattening lots with cattle reared on hormones. The average farm size in the US is 1,200 acres, carrying livestock striving to exist in drought. The ideology of rapidly expanding state-owned industrial dairy farms in China means carrying 20,000 cows.
The agri-food sector in Ireland employs 168,000 people in 700 food and drinks firms, exports to 160 countries worldwide and sources 74 per cent of the raw materials and services from Irish suppliers, compared to 43 per cent for other manufacturing companies, and is vital to the economic health of the rural economy in keeping local shops, schools and sports clubs alive.
The alternative ideologies to sustain rural Ireland are as yet undefined by those who decry the current model, but organic food production, forestry, solar farms and niche alternatives will not put cheap food on the tables for much longer where drought, fire and other weather events are curtailing world food production and where famine is now common in parts of the world less blessed than us living in a land of plenty.
The ad hoc policies that see prime agricultural land removed from food production, covered in solar panels producing energy for data centres, lacks any semblance of a coherent “ideology” that addresses the needs of farmers, food production and the environment. – Yours, etc,
TOMÁS FINN,
Cappataggle,
Ballinasloe,
Co Galway.