I have eyes and ears all over the country, but they were seeing and hearing nothing following Tuesday’s marathon meeting between the Minister for Agriculture, the IFA and the Irish Grain Growers, in relation to the Straw Incorporation Measure (SIM).

That silence leads me to deduce that some progress was made. After all, if Charlie McConalogue had stonewalled them, the farm organisations would have been out decrying his intransigence.

And let’s face it, there needs to be. The Straw Incorporation Measure fiasco, which will be referred to as the “SIMF” from here forward, may only be a week old, but it has caused chaos in its short lifespan.

Farmers who applied for the SIM, the scheme which preceded the SIMF, still have not received notification of any change, or proposed change, to it.

The official position of the Department is that applicants were never formally accepted into or approved for the scheme.

This may be technically true and it may be legally sound, but it is ethically and morally bankrupt.

Let’s for a moment accept that Minister McConalogue is correct when he says there will be a fodder crisis. Firstly, straw is not fodder. It won’t alleviate the fodder shortage by even a fraction of 1%. So the scheme is a failure as a fodder provider.

The tillage sector could alleviate a fodder crisis by growing cover crops like rape, kale and redstart for grazing. However, last winter’s debacle around lieback rules for grazing stubbles and cover crops (a second cousin of the SIMF) wrecked tillage farmers’ trust in growing such crops. The Department isn’t well placed to rebuild that trust.

The minister has also asserted that there is going to be a shortage of bedding this winter, and the SIMF is intended to prevent importation of straw.

A shortage of straw is a real prospect, because of the bad harvest and long winter, meaning no carryover of straw, allied to poor planting conditions last autumn and a very late spring.

But all this was known in early May, before the SIM closed. In fact, if anything, the potential straw shortage has receded, with late-sown crops progressing well.

If the Department and the minister were on the ball, early May was the time to make adjustments to the scheme.

The qualifying rankings could have been changed, so oilseed rape (OSR) ranked highest, followed by oats, wheat and barley, we now would have the first 30,000ha entered into the scheme (OSR and oats) being straw nobody wants.

Problem mostly solved.

If success has many fathers, I’m afraid the SIMF is a bit of an orphan.