“‘Tis as broad as ‘tis wide”, said a very experienced Galway sheep farmer when I brought up the subject of having lambs ready for Easter at a recent farmer meeting.

The extra costs, never mind the extra work, mean early lambs are likely to leave similar margins to mid-season lambing flocks. To make it worthwhile, a sale price of at least €7/kg is necessary. At the time of writing, factories are quoting €6.70/kg, meaning the man from the west is probably right.

This raises the question of how and when we sell our lamb (or beef for that matter), and the wider issue of selling versus marketing a product.¸

I now know that this support is just as important to provide the mental strength to know you can cope with a crisis

As a rule of thumb, selling means persuading people to buy what you have, whereas marketing means finding out what people want and creating it for them.

Wider consumer trends and food choices are also something us farmers are only mildly aware of, but they have a major influence on farm-gate prices.

We might know about veganism because of the noise its supporters make, but a Tesco representative said on the business pages of this paper a few weeks ago that consumption of meat and dairy has not dropped despite this noise. Other trends, however, are having a bigger influence and are mostly under the radar. Over the decades, consumers have moved away from simply needing food to eat. Many now want a “dining experience”.

Put this together with working longer hours, meaning less time to prepare and cook a meal from scratch, and you have a large market for ready-made meals with plenty of seasoning to make it seem like more of an experience.

For supermarkets to service this market, all they need from farmers and processors is cheap, plain, raw materials: beef, lamb, and vegetables.

A neighbour used to grow lots of potatoes years ago but gave up when his business customers demanded more and more big, bland spuds which they could then add flavour to and sell on to the public as fancy crisps and pre-seasoned chips. The value they added to the basic ingredient never increased the price paid to the primary producer.

This brings us back to the traditional Easter market for lamb. Like turkey at Christmas, people eat more lamb at Easter. But consumption is now spread more evenly across the year, and consumers expect every kind of dining experience to be available at a low price all year round.

While seasonality will continue to play a role in price, it looks like the peak will become less pronounced in the coming years.

The value of Easter lamb has been eroded before our eyes and we need to start thinking about adapting our enterprises to meet market demand

We can no longer afford to ignore these trends and other wider considerations. The value of Easter lamb has been eroded before our eyes and we need to start thinking about adapting our enterprises to meet market demand, rather than continuing to produce what we have always produced just because we have always done it like that. If that means producing lambs and cattle to a certain spec, and getting them out the gate at a different time of the year, then so be it.

Finally, best of luck to our neighbours the Kiersey family who will be at the West Waterford Festival of Food in Dungarvan next week with their food start-up called Freezin’ Friesian. The family produces rolled ice-cream and frozen yoghurt from their own dairy enterprise, and are a prime example of how food can be marketed rather than sold.