‘Young Farmer title was highlight of my life’

LIFE has been a roller-coaster for Mayo man Michael Dee, who was the first winner of what was then the FBD Young Farmers of the Future competition in 1999.

Now 36 and married with four children, the man from Began, Claremorris, said the competition was the highlight of his life.

It was a great boost to his confidence and came at the right time in a changing agricultural scene.

“We got out of cows and built up a big mushroom enterprise employing 22 people.

“But the costs got the better of us, along with a number of other things,” he said.

Recalling his decision to go into mushroom production, he said he was working on hard-to-farm land in the west of Ireland. A lot of the land was rented and the weather was bad.

“We had purchased a lot of our milk quota, some of it at a high price. When we saw the value going off the quota, we decided to take our money, sell our quota and cows and concentrate on the mushrooms.

“They went well for a while but we were always struggling. We tried to weather the difficulties. But once the Celtic Tiger got going there were other things to do in Ireland and mushrooms became a low commodity choice,” he said.

Michael said the cost of diesel, electricity, labour and water had a serious impact on the business and the price of the product they were selling dropped by 30% over a couple of years.

“When you combined all those reasons, it did not make sense to keep going. We quit the mushrooms in May 2006. I am now doing a bit of drystock farming.

“Circumstances, I suppose, conspired against me. I don’t think any of the moves I made were wrong. I made the right decisions at the right time for the position I was in,” he said.

Michael said he would love to build up his farm and get it into a profitable mode again, but unless things change he did not think it would get to the profitability scale needed to support a family.

However, the Mayo man is as enthusiastic today about the future of rural Ireland as he was when he won the competition a decade ago. But he admits there are a few things that he might do differently if he was starting all over again.

His clear advice to young farmers in what is now an even more rapidly changing industry than it was when he won the competition in 1999: “Don’t be afraid to take the hard decisions.”