THE Irish farming community is different from the rest of the EU in one important respect. Unlike their EU colleagues, Irish farmers own the land on which they work, making them the most independent in the Union. In most other countries, farms are held on long leases or, as in Britain, occupied for a limited number of years by tenant farmers.
This land owning status has had both positive and negative impacts. Farming is, for instance, one of the most class structured elements of Irish society, with the 50 acre farmer feeling himself superior to the 20 acre man, although both are way beneath the very large farmers. Dairy farmers feel superior to cattle farmers and both these categories consider themselves better than the sheep farmer.
The large dairy farmers are the elite and tend to flaunt this. The man in the Merc is almost inevitably a dairy farmer. If not, he is most likely to be a cereal farmer, one of whom was paid nearly £150,000 last year by the EU for not planting under the set aside programme.
Big or small, all farmers spend a lot of money, because farm inputs are high and they must spend to stay in business. Tractor sales, for instance, mirror the wealth of farmers far more closely than any CSO figures.
The average farm size in Ireland is about 60 acres - nearly twice the European average - but more than half of all holdings are under 50 acres. Less than 12 per cent are more than 100 acres.
Really large farms of 250 acres and upwards are owned by only 2.3 per cent of farmers.
There has been a steady growth in the number of part time farmers in Ireland and many of these rely for their cash on a working wife or partner, known in the politically impolite language of the farmer as the "laying hen".