Ministers Harris & Chambers must introduce method of dealing with “wildly erratic and unpredictable” farm incomes

Ministers Harris and Chambers have been told that the “wildly erratic and unpredictable nature” of farm incomes is causing a looming succession crisis as more and more young people choose not to ‘ride the rollercoaster’.  In a meeting this afternoon, and with six-odd weeks to go before the 2027 Budget, ICMSA President, Denis Drennan, told the Ministers that until and unless meaningful measures were introduced to ensure some degree of predictability and capacity for planning, the next generation of potential farmers would ‘vote with their feet’ and pursue careers other than farming where they were so desperately required.

Mr Drennan said that ICMSA had been pointing out for a decade that it was eminently possible to introduce measures that would allow farmers to put monies aside in Revenue-supervised accounts and ‘smooth-out’ income in a way that would allow them to avoid the worst destruction inflicted by the kinds of ‘Boom-to-Bust’ cycles we have seen in recent years. Mr Drennan said that in the worst of years and circumstances, the ability to draw down on these deposit accounts might be all that’s ensuring that there’s food on the table and that ordinary household bills are being paid.

He maintained that ‘Income Averaging’ simply didn’t work – and specifically didn’t work for new entrants – and he said that ICMSA’s own surveys showed that young farmers repeatedly cited the wildly erratic and unpredictable nature of farm incomes as the biggest obstacle to their going back and taking over their family farms.

“We know that the sons and daughters of farm families are just not willing to maybe uproot their families and leave paid employment in pharma or finance or whatever, to go back to take over the family farm. They’ll end up working twice as long without any of the work-related benefits and could then see after a whole year’s work that they’ve actually made less than the minimum wage or even lost money – as our dairy farmer members have in the year from September 2025 to now.  They won’t do it anymore! And realistically, why would they?   We have to introduce some degree of predictability into farm incomes through a farm deposit scheme and we have put forward several versions of such a scheme trying to show the departments concerned that this both feasible and necessary”, said Mr Drennan.

Stressing that all the ICMSA designs were completely under the supervision of the Revenue Commissioners, Mr Drennan noted that several states had already brought forward schemes of this type to deal with precisely this kind of challenge.

“Australia had exactly the same problem and introduced exactly the kind of scheme that we recommended to our departments concerned with drafting of budgetary measures. At today’s meeting we once again explained to Ministers Harris and Chambers that it’s possible to address these problems with a bit of imagination and energy or we just have to go on looking at an obvious problem getting bigger and bigger in front of our eyes.  There’s a point where even the civil servants have to accept that there’s a specific problem with wildly erratic farm incomes and the next generation won’t put up with that they way that previous generations did – because they don’t have to!  Unless we move positively to solve this problem then we won’t have that next generation of farmers and the family farm model that was the basis of rural Ireland, will stop.

Ends 31 August
Denis Drennan, 086-8389401
President, ICMSA.

Or

Cathal MacCarthy, 087-6168758
ICMSA Press Office