The underlying culture of the Irish farm sector is overwhelmingly male and that is reflected in the low level of female farm ownership, UCD’s Professor Monica Gorman told the Irish Rural History and Policy Conference.

Prof Gorman pointed out that just one in eight farms are owned and operated by women, with that proportion halving when it comes to the dairy sector.

“We’re still looking at 12-13% of female ownership of farms. It is higher in smaller farms, and lowest in dairying at around 7%. It is higher again in organic farming,” Gorman said.

However, land ownership statistics only tell part of the gender imbalance story in farming, the UCD academic maintained.

“The underlying culture is still largely that farming and land belongs to men,” Gorman claimed.

“I bought a farm myself which I also sold. But that whole thing of ‘is himself at home?’ Or, ‘is the boss man there?’ You kind of think that this is the 21st century, but that’s the prevailing culture,” she said.

Indeed, the lecturer in agricultural extension and innovation questioned if attitudes had moved on all that much since the 1950s when her mother inherited the home farm.

She told the conference that her mother’s work in a solicitor’s office at the time “actually put her in fear in terms of succession and holding onto control of property”.

After marrying her father, Gorman’s mother “immediately made him her co-owner” of the farm.

While the Succession Act was a positive legal development for women, Gorman pointed out that ingrained attitudes rarely kept pace with legal developments.

“Just because the law changes, it doesn’t mean the heart changes,” she said.

Looking to the future, Gorman pointed out that roughly half the students doing agriculture and food science were women.

The percentage was lower in the agricultural colleges but on the increase.

This point was also taken up by Maura Walsh of IRD Duhallow, who said that mechanisation had facilitated the entry of a lot more women into agriculture.

“You no longer have to be a big brawny man to be a farmer,” she said.

Need to talk

One of the constant messages from the conference on succession was the need for families to communicate and talk about succession. This point was made by Aisling Meehan, Monica Gorman and Tomás Russell.

Ironically, UCD lecturer Russell said that instead of communication on succession, there was a “silence” and an “embedded fear” around broaching the subject.

“Even the term succession gets farmers to go silent. Because they don’t want to talk about it; they don’t want to talk about dying, or passing away or thinking of conflict,” he said.

However, he explained that the process of succession was defined as “gradual transfer of management from one generation to the next” in the academic literature, which is a “real positive thing”.

Getting into the kitchen

The importance of women to farming in the 1950s and ’60s was outlined by Michael McGrath, the former CAO in Clare. McGrath told the conference that after graduating from UCD’s agricultural science degree programme, he inflicted himself on the farmers of east Clare as an advisor.

However, he quickly found out that if he wished to influence farm management practices, he would have to make it into kitchen – where the big decisions of the day were taken. It was a salutary lesson in ‘realpolitik farming style’ for the young Master McGrath.

Inheritance and succession - the difference

Succession mediator Clare O’Keeffe made a very interesting intervention from the floor of the conference when she insisted that there was a big difference between inheritance and succession.

“Inheritance is what happens after we die.

“Succession is what happens when we are alive; it is the transfer of management,” O’Keeffe explained.

She said that good succession plans provided a safe way for farmers to exit farming, while protecting their interests financially.