Imagine if Erling Haaland was released by Manchester City and announced his retirement. Or Trent Alexander Arnold didn’t have his contract renewed past the summer at Liverpool and said he was giving up football. People would have many questions.

There would be debates on what was wrong with football, particularly if the players confirmed that they had no health issues and loved playing football, but could no longer see a pathway in the profession for themselves.

When someone who is in the top 1% of what they do, and who clearly loves what they are doing, says they are exiting that profession, people are bound to ask questions. And that is exactly what is happening next week, when Carlow farmer Jamie Kealy sells his dairy herd.

Jamie is interviewed on page 15. It’s clear that he loves dairy farming, is very good at it, is in the full of his health and has no financial difficulties.

But his current lease agreement is coming to an end, and he can’t see a way to continue to milk the herd he has built up elsewhere.

The detail of how or why his lease arrangement is ending is nobody’s business but his and the landowner. But it should concentrate everyone’s mind that someone who should have decades of dairy farming in front of them is stepping away.

Dairy processors need thousands of farmers to come through to supply billions of litres of milk over the next decade, they should be concerned. All the companies who supply inputs to farmers need to be worried. Government needs to ask questions as to whether it has properly addressed the issue of land mobility.

I’m not suggesting that property rights should be impaired, but there is no incentive for someone to rent, lease or sell land to a new entrant, young farmer, or small farmer.

To avail of the tax incentives to lease land, it matters not a fig if the lease is to a 30-year-old starting out with enthusiasm and a little seed capital, or to John Magnier, or Michael O’Leary. This is not progressive taxation, the mobility is all geared towards the exiting landowner and not the entrant.

The demographic profile of dairy farming means we need as many as 10,000 newcomers over the next decade or so. They won’t all be dairy farmers sons and daughters; new blood is essential.

The cost of buying land is prohibitive for all but the deepest of pockets, and leasing a property often means making 30 years of investment in a holding where you have a decade’s tenure.

Drystock farmers are even older on average, with fewer successors coming through.

Something has to change structurally, and fast.