Hannah Quinn-Mulligan: Farmers shouldn’t fear change – but they need to be ready for it

Sometimes we forget that time will move every situation forward and at the end of the day all we can plan for is way to land on our own two feet.

It’s a thought that comes to me when I see pictures of the dark, towering, skeletal remains of vast whaling stations in the Antarctic. At one time whaling was the fifth largest sector of the American economy and everything from fashion to fuel was sourced from the mass slaughter of whales.

Closer to home, many people might have noticed miniscule stone sheds in farmyards around Co Clare. Before sheep came to the country, Irish people kept goats, and the kid would be housed in a tiny shed to ensure that the nanny goat returned each day from wandering around the Burren to feed it and then be milked.

At the end of the summer, the kid goat would be slaughtered — the tender meat was considered a delicacy.

From forgotten tiny goat sheds to vast whaling stations, no industry or person is too important not to have to face change at some stage.

I sometimes look around my farmyard and wonder in decades to come, which aspects of current farm life will be used as museum pieces and which will stand the test of time.

Our arm still has a shed with old-fashioned, wooden milking stalls with stone troughs in front of them. With seven stalls on either side of the shed and a custom-made open slurry channel and drain, it was a top-of-the-range facility 100 years ago, but is now used as a place to store fencing equipment.

A few farmers reading this will have similar examples of the past around their yards.

Everyone knows farming is facing a world of challenges between climate change, new banding rules and increasing public censure, but what amazes me is the way those in power to throw their hands in the air and call for mass panic and hysteria.

I’m a big fan of the RTÉ radio show The Business, and it seems that 80pc of the successful entrepreneurs they feature have grown up on farms and credit their success to learning how to be resourceful from a young age on the farm.

This resourcefulness is evident on almost every farmyard I walk into, where a farmer will have invented some new tool or system to make their lives easier. Yet we seem to be consistently represented by people who want to dwell on problems and use scapegoats as pinatas.

It doesn’t matter what size, shape or political party colour the scapegoat pinata is, it can be beaten to smithereens, but it won’t change the fact that change is coming for the sector.

The time to panic is long gone; now is a time to find solutions. These solutions could involve looking to other countries where farms generate an income from a staple herd and another one from solar panels on their shed roofs. Time moves and times change.

In 1960s Ireland there was a farmer protest that rocked the nation and in the UK, the government was effectively brought down by a sex scandal.

Fast-forward to more recent times and a scandal involving a pole-dancing businesswoman and British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, rinses off him like water from a duck’s back, and in Ireland, a bitter farmer protest leaves more questions than answers.

Times have changed but ultimately farmers should see that they don’t need a scapegoat to survive, just a little more faith in their own ability.

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Hannah Quinn-Mulligan is a journalist and an organic beef and dairy farmer; templeroedairy.ie