Over 300 farmers protested in tractors in Waterford city on Friday night.

Farmers from Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford drove into the city to highlight the frustration among farmers in the industry.

Wexford Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) chair Jer O’Mahoney told the Irish Farmers Journal that calendar farming, delayed payments and bureaucracy are affecting farmer livelihoods.

“The weather has been atrocious for the last year, year and a half, and with calendar farming, it’s proving impossible to stay within the [time] bands [to get work done],” he said, citing the slurry spreading and hedge-cutting closed periods.

ACRES

He said the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy in the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) has angered farmers.

“It’s the failure of that bureaucracy to actually deliver. The Minister [for Agriculture] has had to give out €4,000 payments because his Department couldn’t pay us what they owed us.

“It is a damning indictment of their ability to produce a scheme and deliver on it,” he said.

Farmers are fed up with paperwork, he said.

“We’re not being paid on time for what we do,” he said. O’Mahoney added that there are plans for more protests in the coming weeks.

“This is building up to the local and European elections,” he said.

Pride in farming

Waterford IFA county chair John Heffernan told the Irish Farmers Journal that protest momentum will continue to build up until this summer’s elections.

“We have to respond to the pain on the ground. People sat down after Christmas and started doing plans for the year. They started to look at their budgets and incomes are going to be down.

“It’s at the kitchen table that a lot of this stuff has come home – the realisation of what’s happened in recent months,” he said.

Heffernan cited the cut to the nitrates derogation, the effect of flattening of payments and no support for the tillage sector are the major issues affecting farmers in his county.

“There’s a lot of anger that after a very bad year last year that there’s no plan for support for the tillage sector,” he said.

He said the three-crop rule needs to be looked at and that, on a practical level, the requirements being placed on farmers are making their lives difficult.

“The sacrifices they are making don’t make sense on practical grounds,” he said.

The Waterford IFA chair said that farmers were being blamed for everything and that the pride had been taken out of farming.

“Last night gave a bit of that pride back,” he said, noting that it also brought out the next generation of young farmers.

“That’s something IFA meetings haven’t been able to do,” he said.