Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

No I don't think I would I wouldn't change my youth and being able to work with and help out my father and relations but I think I would be as happy now in another occupation as I am now farming without as much work and hardship by times ( yes i know large parts of the hardship are self inflicted. 😄)

Great system..but the contractor would nearly have to live on the farm!

and for that you need scale and lot of expertise ….majority of Irish farms don’t and most bar I’d say colmorre def don’t hence why we stick at 1/2 enterprises we’re good at

A bit of bulky strong silage is great feeding for dry cows and supplementing weak spring grass. I see a lot of lads cutting topping this week. And they after running out of silage this year. Great to have quality bales for cows after calving but I think you need a bit of a bite for the rest of the winter.

What was the subsistence farming that went on all over the country with near starvation in the country side and actual starvation in the slums in Dublin ...…great practices indeed

When was this?? 1840's potato plots?? I'm taking about family farms that raised kids and put food on the table via mixed outputs that reflected the best margins. If you think progress is rapidly shrinking number of farms, ageing farmer profiles , mass importation of once locally grown veg, grains, fruit, animal feed etc. then so be it. Not to mention the number of farms currently propped up by off farm incomes and CAP money that was non-existent 50 years ago.

I was merely commenting on how farming policies of the past 50 years have affected margins, farmer numbers, rural economies etc. Those claiming that the current situation is somehow a better outcome on those factors are clearly not engaging with the reality of where the industry is currently heading. The ongoing strong resistance to meaningful CAP reform to address some of these issues by the main farming orgs is also part of this sorry picture.

pre e

Ireland joining the eu it was and is rapidly returning to subsistence farming in Ireland ....there was regularly famine type conditions in the slums and poorer areas of Dublin Cork and I'm told parts of Waterford city throughout the 60's and 70s the information is all there recorded. What went on in Ireland pre eu. (Definitely in my area) was close to hunger on a constant basis that was first hand from my father and both grandfather's.

The difference is the climate, the actual size of the country, the culture as dawg has suggested, the bloody land commission in Ireland ,The ability to grow different crops without going broke , and last but definitely not least we have inherited the cheap poor quality food idea from England with the quality food being used as a loss leader to gain market share why would people build glass houses etc when the can buy it for pittance in comparison

That's the thing. They cant justify buying land at the current prices. It would take 3 generations of farmers to repay the purchase price. So they don't have the scale to engage in multiple lines of farming. If I hadn't got on the purchasing ladder years ago I wouldn't be where we are at now.

YA, Michael O' Leary and coolmore are at that craic growing all their own feed. Maybe 1000 acres will be the new 100 acres.

Machines and technology to enable one work unit to complete more work in the day changed things.

All businesses are prone to expansion if they're going well, why wouldn't you make life easier.

A local filling station is expanding all the time, the owner ploughs a lot of money in to charities, ie 200 christmas dinners this year to the less fortunate and volunteers for samaritans. He has just finished training as a nurse and is a full time nurse now.

Public service will be a rest for him now if he can tolerate the waste that goes on

my folks did 20 years ago, had funds to go after a bit of a farm near us last Feb but the whole farm went for 25k an acre in the end, bought by farmers with non farming money

dairy farming through derogation is the only mainstream enterprise that could stand its own with out sfp imo. Great case for its retention imo. My folks would have been mixed farming back in the day, bullocks, barley and cows. But land was cheap, inputs were cheap and you could actually make decent money from each enterprise.

There will be feck all money from tillage this year or last year. Tillage here is just gone to an acres game, every extra acre reduces the machinery costs for the big boys, they’re the competition for conacre and land lease around here

Beef is good the last year but it hasn’t been for a long time and with the derogation reduction and cow banding there’s a lot less dairy farmers keeping cattle and they’re not going to pay 4-500€/ac to either