Climate Bolloxolgy.

Now your just trolling if they had a job it was because they were going to starve otherwise and the jobs weren't there for people 🙄🙄🙄🙄

just goes to show the misleading bullshit the media and government a peddling. Irish livestock farming has to be the most carbon efficient food production in the world. The grass that they consume absorbs massive amounts of carbon. A truly circular process.

Dont forget about the poor people working in foreign countries with their families scattered all over the world who they might like to visit and have visit them.

And I thought I was banging on about it too much.

Cutting to the chase, what do you think is the actual point? Do you think Ciaran Fitzgerald is correct to say output is the "equivalent" of feeding 40 million?

I haven't any figures, but I don't find it hard to believe that farmers made a reasonable income in the early decades of EU membership. It was an important reason for joining at that time, and (IIRC) our national income was only about half of the (then EEC) average.

In you go back to 1922, of course, the one thing you find is far more farmers. There were about 360,000 farms in 1915 - which fell to about 140,000 by 2010.

Put another way, that's 200,000 farms that didn't survive as independent viable units.

Make of that what you will.

Thank you, you're supporting my point.

Most farmers in the first 50 years of the state probably made a living off the land and weren't hobby farmers with off farm jobs based on those figures.

Farmers shouldnt worry about or waste their time with the nutter trolls on here, just wait for the upcoming food shortages and have the last laugh.

Don't do as I do, do as i say comes to mind

Indeed, although in a context where national income per head was very low - maybe half the UK level - and emigration was rampant. The equivalent of 80% of people born in the 1930s emigrated in the 1950s, many from rural areas (because Ireland was mostly rural at that time). So it would be wrong to see the first fifty years as years of great farming prosperity.

Consider the full point. 60% of farms did not survive as independent units, which is highly suggestive of a viability problem. Put another way, if most farms ceased as independent units, then it looks like most farms in the 1920s were not able to sustain a living and most young people emigrated.

Run forward to today, and folk find they don't have to emigrate to find jobs with reasonable incomes. That obviously changes the context.

But I think the main point is you can't think about the first 50 years of the State without noticing the emigration and consolidation of farms.

The grass is the only source of Carbon that the cow emits..

The grass took its Carbon out of the atmosphere, over the previous 21 days

I clearly remember studying the Carbon Cycle in science class and our book had an animation of a cow eating grass and dunging on the ground. There were all sorts of arrows involving fungi bung beatles etc. Cycle of life and has being for millenia.

Do you seriously think that you are paying for all the costs of production when you buy food ?

And if farms in Ireland are not financially viable and so then closed, are you happy that production is moved to say Brazil ?

In the real world you pay a price that factors in production costs, transportation, margins for resellers, distributors, etc.

According to BordBia latest report Irish meat factories are offering producers a base price of between €4.20 and 4.25/kg for steers.

Do you think that covers the cost of insiminating the cow and the ongoing costs like vets bills, antibiotics for disease, doses for fluke/worms/scour, feed production costs (diesel, tractor & machinery maintenance, fertiliser or slurry storage, plastic to cover silage or bale wrap/bale net/twine) over the roughly two years that farm had the animal ?

Even so called massive farms factor in income from subsidies to help with their profitability.

The option to subsidisation is wholesale industrialised farming in things like feedlots and/or the consumer paying much greater prices for their products.

Earlier this year head of National Dairy Council Zoe Kavanagh came up with this interesting detail the NDC had found out about consumers.

Having tracked trends via annual consumer sentiment surveys – and most recently during the Covid-19 lockdown – the NDC boss explained that while the majority of consumers “want action” on climate change, price and nutritional issues still outweigh climate concerns for purchasing food – with the carbon footprint of food only an issue for one in 10 consumers.

Ms Kavanagh said: “As it stands, when the consumer walks into a shop to purchase food in general the key driver is price – 46pc say ‘price is the key driver’; while 34pc say ‘nutrition and health is the driver’.

“Only 28pc say ‘provenance is a driver’ and actually just 10pc say they think about carbon footprint.

This methane map is interesting (https://pulse.ghgsat.com/)

I didn't know there were so many cows in the Sahara

And this too:

What I find interesting here is 30% of Methane comes from wetlands, and it's government policy to rewet vast area of land here

Darragh McCullough: Nowhere else has a more sustainable Daisy, so why should we reduce the national herd?

Who is daisy? :p