A trip down memory lane is a reminder that us farmers are made of tough stuff

The social distancing of the last few weeks meant I could no longer avoid jobs like clearing out a lot of boxes from the family farmhouse that we moved into some time ago.

The problem when I start working through old files, diaries and odds and ends is that it sparks memories and reveals fascinating insights into the graft and innovation that went into developing the farm over the years.

So many things seem so foreign about the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s nowadays: the Department letter from the ’50s certifying that my granddad had dipped all the sheep; his milk and grain board subscription cards from the ’60s; the ’77 notice explaining how his first official tax return would be calculated, when any earnings north of £10,500 (€66,500 in today’s terms) were being taxed at an eye-watering 80pc. And the authorities wondered why tax evasion was an issue...

But there were lots of things that are eerily familiar.

My dad recalled the month in ’69 he spent quarantined in his bed sweating out a suspected case of brucellosis.

Nobody was allowed visit him, partly to protect their own health. However, I think my dad and granddad might have been more concerned about it being transferred to the two prize Charolais cattle that they had spent a small fortune on in France.

One of the cows cost over £2,000 (€38,000 today), which roughly equates to four acres of land, both then and now.

In the subsequent year that it took for the animals to travel and clear quarantine in Spike Island, brucellosis broke out in our dairy herd, and my dad and granddad were terrified that it was going to spread to their très expensive Charolais.

It was a big punt but it paid off handsomely, with the first calf making £4,000 (€62,115 today) at auction two years later.

It was symptomatic of the era when Taoisigh and presidents exhorted farmers to increase production, and banks obliged by handing out money like confetti.

Invested

Later in the ’70s, my dad invested £170,000 (€1m today) in onion and grain stores. It was state-of-theart stuff with bespoke ventilation systems for curing onions with heated air, along with refrigerated stores to prolong the storage life of the crop.

These days with zero interest rates, inflation is almost a forgotten concept. But as the figures above show, it has been an invisible force that changed the value of everything.

Compare the 8pc inflation of the decade just passed with 249pc of the ’70s and 125pc in the ’80s.

The resulting bank interest rate spike to 24pc in the ’80s paralysed businesses everywhere, including our own.

The piles of meticulous cashflows that my dad compiled for the banks during this period were proof of the pressure he was under for repayments, despite the money he was churning. The number of suicides in the farming community had worried wives afraid to let husbands go to the sheds on their own at night, for fear of what might happen.

It took the liquidation of our Charolais herd along with land before the ship was steadied again for the start of the ’90s and another round of investment and expansion.

Throughout, the farm was an important business in the locality, reflecting the huge role that agriculture played in the national economy.

In the early ’60s, livestock exports including wool and dairy totalled £90m (€2.2bn today), accounting for more than half of all Irish exports. Today, despite agricultural exports ballooning to over €12bn, it only represents a tiny 4pc of our total exports.

Back then, we had 200 ewes on the farm, and national sheep exports were worth £10.7m (€266m today). In the intervening half-century, sheep exports have remained almost static, clocking in at about €250m annually.

Contrast that to dairy exports, which were only marginally higher than sheep in the early ’60s.

Different times:

Eamon McCullough showing one of his pedigree Friesian bulls at the RDS Spring Show in the late 1960s

Today they have mushroomed to more than 12 times their value in ’62.

Our farm was part of that change, with the sheep vanishing during the subsequent 50 years, and the dairy herd expanding by more than 17-fold. The farmers in my family were no different to any other farmer — they followed opportunity.

But it also strikes me that the opportunities in farming now are, relatively speaking, far smaller than what’s on offer in the wider economy.

What if that million euro was invested in houses rather than onion stores or Charolais cattle?

But then that’s what farmers do, isn’t it? They invest in farming, through the highs and the lows.

And it’s reassuring to realise at times like these that us farmers are made of tough stuff.

It was a big punt but it paid off handsomely, with the first calf making €62,115 in today’s money