Anyone with a pulse and a smile is welcome in my new farming organisation

THE turning of the year is marked by many things; by the tilt of the earth, the fading of the foliage, the shortening of the day and of course, the Ploughing Championships — the latter being the most welcome of these signs and portents.

This great festival of rural Ireland is like the changing of the clocks; once it’s over it’s time to be putting the shoulder to the wind and preparing for whatever the Atlantic or the Arctic will throw at us. According to the weather people we would be wise to brace ourselves.

The stubble fields where the hundreds of thousands will park their cars and Jeeps are reminders that the end of the ‘season of mellow fruitfulness’ is nigh.

Harvest is that time of the year when farmers take stock, when they can see with their eyes, in material and physical terms, the outcomes of the year. The stacks of bales, the heaps of grain and the pits of silage tell the tale, along with the condition of the animals, the volume of milk and the bank balance. They all contribute to painting the picture of the nine months gone by.

It is easy to quantify these results but it is far harder to ‘evaluate’ them, to put a whole value on the achievement of them. In simple terms, what answer comes to mind when you ask “was it worth it?” The bank balance or the bank imbalance will tell a lot, as will the bill at the co-op or at the merchant’s depot.

But what about the health, the state of the family, the heart and the spirit, where are they as we face the drawing in of the evenings and the turning on of the electric blanket?

Which brings me to Bhutan. What, you may ask, has that small Himalayan kingdom to do with electric blankets, but if electric blankets contribute to the happiness of the nation, then the Bhutanese are interested.

Bhutan is a country of less than 800,000 souls sandwiched between Tibet and India. There is much one could say about the place but of interest to me, and hopefully to you, is the curious fact that Bhutanese do not use GDP or GNP to evaluate the wealth of the nation — they use the Gross National Happiness Index.

Since 1972, when King Jigme Singwe Wangchuck made a declaration that Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product, the country has taken the pursuit of happiness to be the key national priority.

This is not some PR notion dreamed up by the King or his advisers; the Gross National Happiness Index as constructed in Bhutan is empirically established and measurable. It is based on the evaluation of nine domains that include: psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity/resilience, and living standards.

Using the Alkire Foster methodology of multidimensional measurement, the government of Bhutan continues to refine and update the index and its measurement. Under the nine domains they have developed 33 indicators to measure the nation’s health and wellbeing beyond the mere economic.

Interestingly, this identifies four groups of people — the unhappy, the narrowly happy, the extensively happy and the deeply happy.

The government takes the results unearthed by these indicators and applies them to the design and implementation of policies that will “increase happiness and sufficiency among the unhappy and the narrowly happy people.”

In case we might think this is all confined to the little Bhutan, in 2011 the United Nations, in a unanimous vote, adopted a resolution introduced by Bhutan and supported by 68 countries that called for a ‘holistic approach to development aimed at promoting sustainable happiness and wellbeing’.

The adoption of the resolution was unanimous, so the Irish government surely

WALKING AROUND THE PLOUGHING, AMONG THE WEATHER-BEATEN AND MUD-SPATTERED CITIZENS OF RUSTIC HIBERNIA, WOULD ONE BE ABLE TO SAY THAT THESE ARE PEOPLE IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS?