COLUMN: Why is farming the focus of the climate change solution?

The rural vote decides General Elections.

A huge part of that vote is the farming community.

And it seems to me that this Government has done a poor job of keeping that vote on side.

There’s still time to win it back, but the narrative around farming and climate change needs to shift. I’m only saying that in the context of winning votes, I’m not saying that’s what would be best for the environment.

Having said that, I’ll never understand why farming dominates the discourse around finding solutions to climate change.

Perhaps I’m ignorant of the science and I’m sure there are those who will have plenty to say about the agriculture sector’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and methane etc.

And I accept all of that.

But as a country boy, whose wife was reared on a farm, I just can’t figure out how the country’s national herd is the focus of the cause of climate change...but the millions of cars, the thousands of buses, the hundreds of trains, the hundreds if not thousands of airplanes, go relatively under the radar if you’ll excuse the pun.

We heard recently how a whole fleet of electric buses are just sitting in the yard - unused!

So other industries are making inroads in going green, but sure so is farming. They even have more environmentally friendly ways of spreading sh*t now.

And yet, it’s the farming industry that gets hammered for not doing enough, that gets asked to cut the national herd.

Farming groups’ perennial argument is that Irish agriculture’s grass-fed farming is among the greenest in the world.

That’s great, but there’s also the argument that the world has to be fed too...and I’m not sure vegetarianism is the solution.

I’d wager a single avocado from country of origin to your supermarket shelf causes more carbon emissions than what comes out the arse of a dairy cow on an Irish farm in a year.

We also have to way up the impacts on livelihoods and there’ll be people who will say that we should be gone past that when the fate of the planet is at stake.

And climate change is a serious issue, I’m simply asking the question, why is farming the focus of the climate change solution?

There’s seems to be an anti-farmer rhetoric in the debate around how Ireland tackles climate change.

And I’d argue no on has adapted and made innovations more than farmers with EU Directives coming out their ears and constant monitoring of how much fertiliser is spread and livestock numbers and the ratio of livestock to grass acreage and on and on it goes.

Farming is a busy enough job as it is but I’m sure most farmers would agree you’d need full-time administrative support at this stage to get through all the paperwork.

Farmers are tough, resilient, they have to be, they spend all their time outdoors, but they need to be brought along with policies, not pulled and dragged along.

Maybe it’s the size of the sector that’s the reason for such attention in the media and in the climate change debate.

And it’s likely the science stacks up that the industry is harmful and the main culprit of emissions.

But sustainable solutions must be found and you must bring farmers with you because despite their reputation for intransigence, they’ll also do whatever it takes to stay farming.

God knows why...

But if Governments make the farm unsustainable as part of a “green agenda”, if you ruin livelihoods through addressing the climate solution through the agricultural sector, well there won’t be much of Ireland left anyway, irrespective of what climate change does to the country.

It won’t be Governments that the rural vote brings down, if you take the farmer out of Ireland, you’ll take the soul of the country too.