The proposed Commission on Generational Renewal in Farming, which was announced over the weekend by Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue, has been described as “an exercise in futility” by one farm organisation.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has said that the issue of getting young people to commit to a farming career was linked to “collapsing farm incomes and ever-increasing regulatory pressures”, something that the association claimed the government had an “inability or unwillingness to accept”.
Denis Drennan, the ICMSA’s president, said that young people would judge a career in farming and primary food-production on the same basis as any other career option.
“There’s something very dispiriting and discouraging about the Irish government pretending that there’s something mysterious or unknown about the failure to get new generations into farming.
“Of course, the government has a right to pretend that it genuinely doesn’t know the reason. But the rest of us, and certainly the farmers, could save the government a lot of time and the expense involved in yet another commission,” Drennan said.
“The reason why the children of farm families don’t want to follow their parents into farming is because those kids see the hours and years of hard work and stress and official indifference and calculate very quickly that there are easier and better paid careers in almost any other sector,” he added.
According to Drennan, younger generations have more options than prior generations, and are exercising those options.
“If they are the children of a dairy family, they don’t see why they should have to work a 60-hour week for roughly half the minimum official hourly wage, so they’re not going to do it.
“A young farmer is now looking at an average ACRES (Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme) of around €6,000 per annum. That young man or woman will remember their parents getting £5,000 per annum 35 years ago… Real support would mean raising the scheme payments in line with inflation and costs,” the ICMSA president said.
“We are regularly encountering situations now where the parents are asking their children to think long and hard about following them into farming, even where the children have expressed a desire to do so,” he claimed.
“The parents are actively dissuading their children from following them into full-time farming because all they see is falling and uncertain incomes, governmental indifference and regulatory stress,” Drennan added.
The farm leader commented: “If Minister McConalogue feels the need to establish a commission to tell him something as screamingly self-evident as that, then it only underlines that sense of disconnect and unreality that is the context for the failure on generational renewal.”