I have been away from the farm for the last 10 days with a farming project I’m involved in and I write from the far side of Europe where the temperature is 23 degrees by day and 3 degrees by night, a contrast from the reported weather in Ireland.

Once the weather comes back around, I will get a flight home and back to the farm to start drilling the next portion of carrots and vegetables.

Grain prices have got a bit of a head of steam up with London harvest wheat at €193/t (£160/t) and Paris harvest rapeseed at €374/t but I’m not sure if these are going to last. If I had a chunk of cereals worth talking about, I would definitely put 50% of it forward on those prices.

Even at these prices though, the margins are still very tight, especially in our situation at home where the greater portion of land we farm is leased. Lowering our cost base at home is the only way we can move out of the danger zone when grain markets lurch in the wrong direction.

One of the biggest issues we have, highlighted even more so when I’m abroad, is our lack of scale. Scale is the only way we can afford to put in place the systems and structures that are cost efficient and profitable, yet we have a bureaucratic system that consistently prevents us from gaining scale.

With the proposed capping of the single farm payment at €100,000 and a sliding scale of support after 100 acres, the EU have tilted the table unfairly against some of our most progressive farmers. While we are nowhere near being one of the recipients of the €100,000+ subsidy, I applaud these guys for putting themselves in a situation where their innovation and scale warranted such support.

Every farm event I attend, I hear about guys bemoaning the lack of young, innovative talent coming into the industry while on the same breadth condemning large scale farming. Missing the wood from the trees, these two points are intrinsically linked. If we don’t have a scalable, profitable farming industry where the brightest and best can push on and earn a comparable income to other top industry earners, we will never attract the best and brightest. A rising tide lifts all boats and having the best in class on our team is essential.

I often wonder if the same proponents of the quaint 100 acre EU country farm would be happy to step out from behind their desk and live off the income of a farmer in this situation rather than a Brussels salary for a year.