Perhaps Irish dairy farming owes Sinead McPhillips a debt of gratitude.

On Monday, after a year of soft shoe shuffling around how dairy expansion and carbon reduction can be reconciled, the Department of Agriculture assistant secretary general for agri-food strategy laid it out straight.

The Department sees three ways of ensuring that the dairy sector plays its part in assisting Irish farming to meet its sectoral target.

The options are a limit on cow numbers, a limit on milk volume, or a limit on carbon output.

Even if 2021 were the base, what is to be done with all the dairy heifers ICBF sees on the horizon?

Quotas any way you look at it, but unavoidable unless farmers themselves come up with a practical alternative, and in short order, a plan must be finalised in the next couple of months.

If it came as a shock, that’s because farmers have been consistently reassured with repeated ministerial talk of “a stable herd” and “an approaching ceiling”.

Rather than bumping off the ceiling, it seems that dairy farming’s head is stuck out through the chimney, with production levels way up on a potential base year of 2018. Even if 2021 were the base, what is to be done with all the dairy heifers ICBF sees on the horizon?

All this is taking place against the backdrop of an utterly changed landscape

Unlike Alice in Wonderland, there is no cake that can be eaten to easily reshrink dairy cow numbers.

Years of inaction and months of empty talk; only last week Leo Varadkar was saying no cut in cow numbers would be needed. Now there are weeks to find a solution, or face a guillotine.

All this is taking place against the backdrop of an utterly changed landscape. As IFA dairy chair Stephen Arthur was heard to remark on Monday evening, it’s hard to plan for the dairy sector in 2030, when you can’t plan a delivery of fertiliser or diesel for next week.

All is changed, changed utterly...these words are embedded in most Irish people’s brains, the line from Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ poem reflecting the reality that when conflict begins, everything is affected.

Fuel, fertiliser, feedstuffs and food itself are becoming scarce and almost unaffordable

Our island status means that we have often been relatively unaffected by the wars that have ravaged Europe throughout history.

This time it’s entirely different. Our globalised economy makes all nations interdependent, and when the largest and most resource-rich country on the planet renders itself a pariah, the whole house of cards is in danger of collapse. Fuel, fertiliser, feedstuffs and food itself are becoming scarce and almost unaffordable.

It may be that Ireland’s grass-based milk, beef and lamb production will withstand these incredible pressures better than most. Every cow and her milk might yet be needed.