Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority, has relaunched its advisory service by setting up two groups, one to deal with commercial farmers and the second to deal with part-timers.
At the launch of the new service in Dublin yesterday, the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Mr Walsh, denied the service was creating a "two-speed farming Ireland". The initiative, he said, was accepting the reality of what had been happening in the industry and giving as much help to each sector as possible.
Mr Walsh said the core target group of the new service would be the 37,000 full-time farmers who had been identified as having an average yearly income of over £22,000. The second group would be farmers whose violability was under threat and who were not capable of making an adequate income from farming alone.
The initial target group of the second service would be the 21,000 farmers currently under threat, and the objective would be to help them generate additional income through on-farm and off-farm activities.
Mr Tom O'Dwyer, chairman of Teagasc, said the first service would be the Technology and Business Service and would be staffed by advisers specialising in key farming enterprises.
The second service, the Rural Viability Service, would meet the needs of people living on farms who did not have sufficient income to keep them going.
Mr Walsh said thousands of farm families had benefited from the increased job creation and one in three farmers was now combining farming with an off-farm job. When spouses at work were included almost 50 per cent of farms had income from an off-farm job and this trend would continue.
Mr Michael Galvin of Teagasc said there would be 200 full-time specialist advisers working in the commercial sector with back-up from their specialist colleagues in research and development.
The focus in the ongoing training of the advisers was financial management, and they were working with Waterford Institute of Technology. The service would not only be there to advise farmers but would also work closely with industry.
Discussion groups and monitor farms, against which commercial farmers could benchmark their performance, would play a key part, as would information technology.
Mr Donal Carey said 268 advisers would be involved in the Rural Viability Service which would be provided free to the remaining 70,000 farmers. Of these 21,000 had been targeted and the advisers would help them get everything possible from their farms and would also help them to look at opportunities outside the farm.
The service would work closely with other agencies such as the ADM groups, F┴S and the VECs in ensuring training and other facilities for families who might need such services.
Welcoming the new services, an IFA spokesman said it was important the Rural Viability Service should be linked to the average industrial wage of £19,500 and there should be benchmarking of the scheme to ensure it was delivering.