I’m sure I’m not the only person who has been asked “why are farmers always so angry” over the last couple of months.

Between nitrates, Mercosur and now Bord Bia, farming has been constantly in the news.

Farm leaders have been making calls and demands on Government.

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There have been more red lines than you’d find on a Derry City jersey. It’s understandable that the wider public is bewildered.

The simple reality is that farmers have little control over their own destiny. The scale of the family farm means they have little negotiating power when it comes to buying their inputs or selling their produce.

Competition law severely restricts the possibility of collective bargaining by large groups of farmers, although the advent of purchasing and producer groups has helped in this regard.

Secondly, farmers operate in a uniquely global marketplace.

The price of grain is defined by the cheapest tonne of maize anywhere in the world at any given moment. Irish farmers have to live with that price.

The price of meat and dairy products is ultimately defined by that grain price, and so it similarly flatlines for long periods. Few others in Ireland have to exist in a high-cost domestic environment while selling at “world prices”.

Volatile

Scale is thus crucial, as margin is volatile, but land prices make purchase prohibitive and rental little more feasible.

And as for intensification of production, environmental restrictions make that impossible. Indeed, emissions must reduce by 30%, fertiliser is being taxed, and direct payments are increasingly linked to environmental goods.

All this means farmers, particularly livestock and tillage farmers, are utterly dependent on direct payments.

But the European Commission wants to slash them by 20%, after decades of a static CAP budget, despite inflation and EU expansion.

So when farmers hear that the Government is going to lift the passenger cap on Dublin Airport, they feel they are being forced to carry the can.

Passenger numbers in Dublin Airport reached five-and-a-half million in 1990, the base year for emissions under the Kyoto Agreement that underpins all Government legislation. They have increased by more than 600% since then, hitting 36m last year.

Government seems happy to let that number go up to 40m passengers. Cattle numbers have hardly changed here over the same time period.

Meanwhile, every drop of renewable energy being generated, mostly from what used to be farmland, is being hoovered up by data centres.

And there is still no functional trading mechanism for carbon credits, which should be the dividend farmers get for sequestration from those data centres and airlines.

Warfare

It’s little wonder that every so often, an issue like the suitability of Larry Murrin to chair Bord Bia explodes into trench warfare. A resolution is needed, but farmers can ignore the finger-wagging from the commentariat, whose understanding of the issues facing family farms lacks depth and breadth.