Research is vital to progress
It’s good advice not just for farmers but for everyone involved in food production.
Agonising over world trade negotiations or even the Lisbon treaty referendum gets you nowhere.
For our top farmers, these have been mere distractions from the day-to-day difficulties of coping with the slowest spring growth in seven or eight years.
Gearing up for increased milk production is another preoccupation, with the EU allowing a 2% increase this year, and further increases expected to pave the way for the scrapping of milk quotas in 2015.
There is significant under-utilisation of resources for milk production on Irish farms.
Many farmers have to plan for increased stocking rates of up to 2.8 cows per hectare on their grazing ground. This could allow increases in milk production of up to 70%, through better farming practices such as greater specialisation in dairying and the use of external land parcels to rear replacements.
Further up the scale, all farmers need governments to keep their eye on the ball too.
Unfortunately, the days of the 1950s are gone, when forward thinking in national economic policy included prioritising investment in agricultural development. Research carried out since then by An Foras Taluntais and Teagasc provided the foundation for Ireland’s modern agriculture and food industry.
Research findings helped Irish farmers gain a comparative advantage in milk production and triple grain yields in 20 years. We gained the knowledge to facilitate rapid expansion in our livestock numbers, develop the highly prolific Belclare sheep breed, dramatically improve the quality of malting barley, and deliver new varieties such as Rooster potatoes.
It was also researchers who enabled world-leading sow productivity in Ireland, created new enterprises such as mushroom-growing, helped the food industry address quality and safety issues, and to introduce the likes of spreadable butter, Leerdammer cheese, and functional foods.
Ireland’s food progress preceded the global “Green Revolution”, which ended famine in much of the developing world through development of high-yield crops. But that’s where the global progress ended, as food prices fell, and governments seemed to think they would stay low forever.
In Ireland and around the world, funding for research to maintain and increase crop yields fell steeply.
But demand for food kept rising, with growing world population and prosperity.
For a while, grain “mountains” satisfied the increasing demand and prices stayed low.
But stocks have plummeted since 2000, and prices rose.
Improvements in yields of grain slowed down, and are now rising at only 1% or 2% per year.
Panic-buying and speculation added to the momentum, with the price of rice soaring from $300 to more than $1,000 per tonne in a few months — partly due to rice yield improvement slowing and even going into reverse in some regions. The results are food price hikes, and starvation and political instability in the worst-affected countries.
The lesson to be learned is that it is short-sighted to neglect agricultural research. The results can be loss of competitiveness in a country like Ireland, or hunger in poor countries.
And who knows what a future of disappearing fossil fuels and global warming can bring?
Many researchers believe that grain-producing regions in North America, Australia and parts of Africa will be devastated by climate changes.
They believe regions such as northern Europe and Canada will experience weather changes which will boost crop growing, and they will have to take on an even greater share of world food production.
Only time will tell, but clever governments will be prepared, and won’t be caught out again without the agricultural research which is vital for progress.
