Tillage farmers in Ireland have an awful lot to contend with these days. Greening, forward trading, ecological focus and crop diversification are some of the many buzzwords flying about the place. A myriad of issues must be addressed so that subsidies can be secured and maintained under the Common Agricultural Policy. It can get confusing, but Liam Dunne and the IFA’s Grain Committee are on hand to provide some guidance.
January 6th, 2015 marked the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Farmers Association. Without it – particularly since Ireland joined the EU – Irish farmers would be lost. For six decades, the IFA has negotiated with bodies at home and abroad and provided a voice to the farmers of this nation. Negotiations are going on all the time.
Kildare man Liam Dunne was elected chairman of the Grain Committee of the IFA in January, 2014. In this capacity, the Athy man is doing all in his power to ensure that tillage farmers are adequately informed and represented. The evening I caught up with Liam, he had just attended the National Tillage Conference. That was as good a place to start as any…
“There was a good crowd present,” he reveals. “The greening issue is a major one at the moment and it actually led off the conference. Under the changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, the greening initiative now accounts for 30% of people’s payment and requires them to focus on crop diversification and ecological focus areas – every farm over 37 acres has to have 5% ecological features.
“The tillage farmer has to have his grant application submitted- online – to the Department by May 15th and a lot of work is needed to get it right. And they have to get it right first time. It’s vital to every tillage farmer as the grant can literally be the difference between operating at a profit or suffering a loss for the year. We are here to educate farmers and help them in any way we can, and to provide a voice by ensuring that they have an input into future legislation.
“We’re here to do whatever business farmers needs doing in the tillage area; it could be anything – negotiations with the Department over sprayer testing and sprayer courses, discussions with merchants over grain prices, talks withTeagasc over research. Recently, a great deal of time has been spent with the greening section of the Department.
“There’s a new environmental scheme called GLAS and we are also in negotiations with them. We speak to the Minister about policies and we are also in regular dialogue with all the other sections of the IFA, regarding the likes of the Rural Development Scheme, for example. We strive to ensure that tillage farmers are adequately represented and looked after within that.
“We’ve had Harvest 2020 and they have already started to talk about the programme for Harvest 2025, and we’ll have input into that as well.
“There’s always something. Last year there was a piece of legislation passed where the Department of Transport introduced a reduction in the permissible height of trucks on the road. We had that successfully increased back to its original height for trucks transporting hay and straw.
“This year there are negotiations about weights and tyres and what the specification have to be on tractors and trailers carrying grain and potatoes etc. on the road. New legislation will be introduced on January 1st next year and the grain section had a big input into that as some of the heaviest loads on the road are loads of grain.”
The Grain Committee of the IFA represents a vast number of farmers. At present, there are up to 20,000 farmers in Ireland growing grain or involved in tillage in some capacity. “Around 8,000 of these would be major growers but you try to represent everybody,” Liam notes.
Liam Dunne is a tillage farmer himself. At the moment, he works 180 acres in Athy, having taken over the family operation from his father Tom in 1989. He grows mostly winter wheat as well as oats and some barley and is also one of only 30 farmers in Ireland who grow peas for Bachelors.
The Kildare man has served on the Grain Committee on and off for the last twelve years and has also served on a number of other IFA bodies. Regarding the challenges facing tillage farmers going forward, he states: “The single biggest problem all the time is farm incomes. Because wheat is a worldwide commodity, which is traded the same as gold or silver, international grain prices are very volatile and there’s very little we can do about the price apart from perhaps get a few euros here or there around the edges. But it’s very difficult.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is educate grain farmers on grain marketing. To this end, we have organised a series of meetings nationwide in February/March to discuss forward trading. Farmers can literally sell their grain any time of year now but they don’t all know how to. You can actually sell it in advance before you even sow, and there are also ways of insuring yourself in case of crop failure. There’s a whole new marketing system available to farmers now and this programme of meetings will show them how to use it.
“We’ve had two very good harvests in the northern hemisphere – which produces close to three-quarters of the world’s grain – and there is a slight oversupply at the moment. During last harvest, the gross price of dried wheat was around €170 a tonne – two years before it was close to €265 a tonne. That’s a 35% drop and a huge reduction like that is very difficult to sustain. If you give any man a 35% pay cut he is going to struggle to make ends meet.
“And remember this is the gross price. Farmers still have a massive amount of overheads. A decent tractor will set you back €100,000 these days and people don’t take this into account. I wish somebody would just hand the machinery out for free, but they don’t. Fertiliser is another huge cost and we’ve taken this issue to the EU Competitions Commissioner. The bottom line is that tillage farmers have an awful lot on their plate and ensuring that their interests are represented is a daily battle.”
But Liam Dunne and the Grain Committee of the IFA will never give up.
Taken from Irish Tractor & Agri magazine Vol 3 No 3, April 2015
