Anyone else watching The Traitors on BBC these days? I’m obsessed. It is different to most 'reality' television, it’s more a game scenario, akin to Survivor, but it’s much more layered.

The premise is simple - 22 contestants arrive at a castle in Scotland. They must work together every day to perform tasks and can build a prize find of up to £100,000 by doing so.

But at the start, three of the group are selected as traitors. They carry out murders every night, ridding the group of people who they perceive as a threat to their existence. Occasionally, they can recruit others from 'the faithful' to their ranks. And every night, the entire group gathers to banish one member of the group.

The game continues until the faithful think they have voted all the traitors out and whoever remains shares the money equally. However, if one traitor has remained undetected, they take the entire pot home.

Extra layer of knowledge

The faithful do not know who the traitors are and have to deduce their presence by their behaviour. They can’t trust anyone. The traitors have the advantage of that vital extra layer of knowledge - they know who are traitors and, by extension, who is faithful.

The viewer knows who the traitors are - we watch them plot and scheme before our eyes, cloaked like medieval monks, in the dead of night in the castle’s turret.

The main fascination for me is the difference in mentality between the faithful and the traitors. The traitors, who have full knowledge of how everyone is cast and aligned, are relaxed, confident, comfortable and controlled.

In contrast, the faithful are conflicted, confused, concerned and unsettled. They don’t know who the traitors are and can only see some of the pieces on the chessboard. Partial knowledge is in itself debilitating.

Watching this is watching human nature and group dynamics at play.

Like sport, The Traitors is essentially psychodrama. In individual sports such as golf, tennis and darts, we watch to see how players cope with stress and pressure. And in team sports, the force of will of managers like Pep Guardiola, Brian Cody, Micky Harte and Bill Belichick is constantly tested, while on-field leaders such as Johny Sexton, Roy Keane, TJ Reid and Stephen Cluxton stretch their abilities, physical and mental, to the absolute limit.

Environmental regulations

What does this meandering have to do with farming? I think this same phenomenon, the debilitating nature of partial knowledge, is at the heart of the face that Irish farming often presents to the wider public.

Many farmers have only a partial understanding of the incredibly wide-ranging, far-reaching and ever-changing slew of environmental regulations. They fear what they don’t fully comprehend, which is entirely understandable.

It is almost a full-time job to be across all the rules that govern farming and most farmers rely on advisers to do the heavy reading for them - they work on a need-to-know basis. And that is fine and probably necessary, but it leaves the nagging feeling that something negative is about to happen.

But farmers who are fully au-fait with current legislation are no more comfortable. And I reckon that there are two main reasons for that.

Firstly, farming runs at a different pace to that of the rule makers. Farms are mostly very small businesses and mostly low-margin ones. Investments must be made with care; stability is key to viability. That requires a relatively long lead-in time, something that didn’t happen where the nitrates derogation changes last year were concerned. They were more wide-ranging that was generally understood outside farming circles.

While the change in organic nitrogen loading (a determinant of stocking rates on grass farms) from 250kg/ha to 220kg/ha sparked most of the anger and gained all the publicity, there were a half-dozen other changes to the nitrates regulations. These ranged from small to significant.

Another ratcheting-up of the regulations can be expected

And farmers know that even as they adapt to those changes, in many cases making now-necessary investment, this regime ends in less than two years and another ratcheting-up of the regulations can be expected.

The second reason that more-informed farmers are deeply uncomfortable is that, like the faithful, they know they are only seeing part of the picture.

Yes, farming has its climate action plan sectoral target of a 25% reduction on 2018 levels. And yes, farming has a roadmap on how to get most of the way there. But the missing part of the jigsaw will change everything whenever it is uncloaked - the LULUCF sectoral target.

I have written of land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) before. It still has no target, two and a half years on from the passing of the Climate Act.

We are now in 2024, halfway between the base year of 2018 and the target year of 2030. And still no target.

We saw in December the publication of the third (2024) version of the climate action plan, which is now going to public consultation, but still no target for LULUCF.

Genuine reason

There is a genuine reason for this. We are only now developing a good understanding of the complex carbon exchange processes between land and atmosphere.

As intensive research takes place, data is changing our understanding of how trees, hedges, grass, crops and unfarmed land absorb and release carbon. For this reason, the Government has kicked the can down the road. At some point, they will have to grasp the nettle and make a call.

We do know that the final target will be within the previously announced landing zone. We also know that the baseline figure for 2018 was 4.8 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2eq). With more accurate data, that figure has soared to 6.26MtCO2eq.

This is not good news - we are trending in the wrong direction. The corresponding figure for 2023 was last month revealed to be 7.31MtCO2eq.

To put this in context, the landing zone announced when the climate action plan was delivered in 2021 was 37% to 58% or 2Mt to 3MtCO2eq. This looks like a pipedream right now.

Even with a changed baseline, a percentage reduction of between one-third and six-tenths sounds extremely ambitious, particularly as we have spent most of the decade talking about targets.

Heavy lifting

With farmers owning and working two-thirds of Ireland landmass of 6.9 million hectares, you don’t have to be a genius to realise that the heavy lifting where LULUCF is concerned will fall on their land and their shoulders. No wonder farmers are genuinely worried about what is coming down the tracks.

Conflicted over a desire to do the right thing for society and protecting their small family businesses, confused over what exactly LULUCF target will be set, concerned over how that will affect their farm and unsettled if they happen to farm peatland.

I can’t stress enough that this is not written as some sly allusion that Eamon Ryan is a traitor. On the contrary, I believe him to be sincere in his views and I think he genuinely envisages a bright future for farming families in a world that takes less from nature and gives more back.

People wonder why farmers sound defensive or resentful at times

But, on the ground, farmers are struggling to cope with the pace of change, always in the shadow of the reality that food prices in no way reflect the realities of food production costs.

Last week, the Dairygold tillage conference heard that a tonne of wheat would have bought you 50 barrels of crude oil in 1973, but today will only buy you four barrels. That’s a tenfold decline in the price of a staple food against a significant benchmark.

This is the reason why farmers intensify production and expand holdings - they are running to stand still. And they are unsettled in the knowledge that they don’t know all that is expected of them.

It has yet to be revealed just how much their small little businesses, built up over generations, are expected to absorb and incorporate over the next few years.

And then people wonder why farmers sound defensive or resentful at times. It's almost inevitable that they do so. Farmers can't afford to be as optimistic as Eamon Ryan, at least not until they can see all the pieces on the board.