Holly Cairns: 'There’s a lack of respect for farmers and we need to rebuild that'
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An organic smallholder on the Turk Head peninsula, Holly Cairns knows only too well how the disconnect between policy and producers can affect rural livelihoods.
Often, she says, producers feel as though their input has been excluded. Something which drove her to take up a career in politics, representing the voices of rural communities on a national scale.
A TD for Cork South-West, and the county’s only woman TD, she is the Social Democrats’ party spokesperson on agriculture, food and the marine, and rural development.
Elected in 2020, Ms Cairns holds a masters’ degree in organic horticulture from University College Cork and has been vocal about Ireland’s “fragile” food system, the need to reduce dependence on chemical fertiliser, and for equity and transparency to be increased along the chain.
“I genuinely thought the pandemic would teach us really important things about how vulnerable our supply chains are; that could have been a moment of realisation for us as a nation and that didn’t happen,” Ms Cairns told the Irish Examiner.
“I thought that was surprising and disappointing.”
What followed was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, posing a grave threat and disruption to the global supply of fertiliser and food, leading to panic over volumes and further panic over prices.
“We’ve really realised how vulnerable the agriculture sector is; how vulnerable that makes our farming families, everybody,” Ms Cairns said.
“And there’s nothing really happening to proof the future.
“We know we’re going to have more crises, we know there’s the climate change crisis, not to mention the more unpredictable ones like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Ms Cairns asked agriculture minister Charlie McConalogue in late March to outline the steps he is taking to ensure that farmers have access to affordable fertiliser, to which he said part of the response is the
2022 Soils, Nutrients and Fertiliser Campaign, a roadmap that alleviates the short-term price pressure while helping farmers reduce their dependency on chemical fertiliser in the longer-term.
“But he extended the derogation for nitrogen?” Ms Cairns said.
“It seems like talking out both sides of his mouth – doing this but also doing that.
“It’s the same stuff over and over again. I think any time there’s a new Government and a new minister you’d hope there’s something different but it seems like more business as usual.”
And this can’t serve Irish farmers, Ms Cairns told the Irish Examiner.
When she was younger, “I don’t know if I was interested or not” in agriculture, “but it was there and I grew up in it”.
“My mum was a dairy farmer, and by the time I was a teenager, dairy farming at the scale we were – very small scale – I think at the maximum we had 16 dairy cows so that just became unviable.
“We had to diversify, we went into beef but again that didn’t go very well either, so I suppose my interest in a way was that I just saw in my life the kind of destruction of the small farm; it was in my peripherals that that was a result of political decision-making.
“The time when Coveney was minister for agriculture, [the EU] lifted the milk quotas which meant basically farmers had to intensify production to make money, now it’s spun that benefits farmers and we need to have more to benefit farmers but that never benefitted the small farm.
“And of course, the knock-on effect of those small farms becoming unviable is that they perhaps sell up to a bigger farm so then instead of maybe 10 farms, you’ve got two, and then you’ve got eight less families in the community, eight less people using the post office, putting kids in the schools.
Eventually, the farm at Ms Cairns' home in Ardagh went down the route of organic vegetable seed production.
Ms Cairns' mother, Madeline McKeever, once studied botany. Ms Cairns said she was “always saving her own seed" and growing food for the family.
When Ms Cairns became more interested in the area, she went and did her masters, which was “eye-opening just to really look at the science and to see how far-flung from the science our policies were”.
“Here’s these non-renewable sources being used as chemical applications that are damaging our water quality, damaging our soil quality, basically ruining the future of farming in the country,” Ms Cairns said.
“We’re such an agricultural country that takes such pride in it; that would have such a huge economic impact on us but also I think a cultural and emotional impact on Ireland to see the industry fail like that. We’re heading down such a dreadful trajectory.
“That was my main motivation to go into politics, that I thought we needed change in our agriculture policy.
“Us practising sustainable methods here on the farm, it’s a bit like you can use your reusable coffee mug for your whole life and that is so important and it does make a difference, but in order to make the actual seismic change or shift that we need to reduce emissions to protect the next generation, you need that policy shift.
“It's good that we all take our own personal responsibility but that’s not going to cut it, we need political change.”
What is a sustainable food system, according to Ms Cairns? Firstly, it would omit the almost “meaningless” word that is “flung around now” – sustainable.
It would also look similar to this:
“The way we used to farm would be that you’d have the number of cattle that you could feed off of what you’d grow on the farm, be it just grass or some fodder, different things like that," Ms Cairns continued.
“Everything that you’d produce from your farm is produced through what grows on your farm, that’s a sustainable model, self-sufficient.
“Huge inputs like industrial fertiliser, feed from South America, maize and soy and all of that, you’re bringing stuff into the farm to produce something to go out that’s unsustainable unless that is a completely renewable source.
“The environmental damage that some of those applications are doing, for example, to our water quality and our soil quality, means that we won’t be able to produce as much food in the future; so for one, we’ll need those chemical applications but then also with worse soil quality as a result of it.
“It’s not only unsustainable, its blatantly unfair to future farmers as well to be left with that kind of soil quality and without those applications to counteract it.”
The worst part of this – according to Ms Cairns – is that “it doesn’t even benefit the farmer" – it “benefits big industry, fertiliser companies for one”, saying that they have a “level of influence” in the industry that is “unreasonable”.
“We know that our health service is dysfunctional, we know it’s dogged by vested interests and exactly the same thing has played out in agriculture, you see it in housing as well," she said.
“The first thing we need is political will, we need different voices in politics, in terms of restructuring the entire policy I don’t necessarily have all the answers, but we need to be looking into it.”
Ms Cairns is currently looking into the potential of proposing a reintroduction of the law to ban below-cost selling that used to exist, which “protected the primary producer”.
“But also small retailers like butchers and smaller shops and abattoirs, all of those things which are consistently closing down in replacement for the supermarket, again this destruction of rural Ireland,” Ms Cairns said.
There is no such thing as cheap food according to Ms Cairns, "it costs us in some way".
“The Government subsidises food. Oftentimes, when I talk to people who are not in agriculture about the issues in farming and how farmers need to be paid a fair price for products, people go ‘consumers can’t afford to pay any more, the cost of living is through the roof, how on earth could we expect people to pay more for their food now in the supermarkets doing their weekly shop’.
“But when you think about it, the Government subsidises the production of food massively; all farmers know that because we get payments, so the Government subsidises it at the production level, and that feels to us as farmers like a real security blanket that we need, but when you think about it, how much does it benefit us?
“It means we have to sell our produce for way less and we have no say in that. The industry decides what we get for that and then the Government kind of tops it up just about to make sure we’re basically not out rioting on the streets bringing all the tractors up to Leinster House.”
Very many farmers are on the breadline, Ms Cairns said.
“If we imagine a restructure of those payments and I know the first kind of comment of this is it sounds like a scary prospect for farmers; but if you didn’t subsidise it at the point of production to farmers then we would be guiding the price for how much we sell our produce for, so that would mean we would only sell it for what we can produce it for," she continued.
“That would give the power back to the producer because we can produce beef for this amount a kilo, we can produce dairy for this amount a litre; we can produce veg for this amount; then the supermarket has to pay it.
“Ultimately, the power should be with the producer. And we’ve been completely disarmed with that by the way the Government payments work.
“And then if the Government-subsidised it at the consumer level, the supermarkets would be the ones who would have to kind of bend and stretch to make that feasible for them then to actually have custom in all of that.
“I think it’s safe to say that the current system just takes any kind of autonomy over what we do away from us as farmers - we don’t get to orchestrate the price at all and that’s where it becomes unsustainable.
“I’m pro a diversified food system; we know we need to restructure it - that starts with ensuring farmers get a fair price for their product and it ends with ensuring we have a diversified sustainable food system.”
Ms Cairns said she is concerned about the amount of imported fruit and vegetables.
"The way things are going, if you imagine we’re having difficulties importing fertiliser, imagine difficulties importing food," she said.
“Shelves would be empty; we’d have beef and dairy but we’d have no fruit and vegetables."
“I’d love to see more people going into horticulture, that being supported and incentivised, and you can see how there’s a real culture away from that.
“Ultimately, what we’ve seen in agriculture is a culture that says basically if you’re not in big dairy you’re not a real farmer and that’s untrue and insulting to sheep farmers, to tillage farmers, to people in horticulture, forestry, all of those sectors that science will tell you we need to be prioritising.
“None of it makes sense; politicians say things like ‘any change in agriculture would be cliff-edge for farmers’ and the result of that is the sector most vulnerable in terms of climate change being the most reluctant to take climate action and that’s a real, real failure of successive Governments in my opinion.”
Ms Cairns and her mother are Farming for Nature ambassadors, as they run an organic 30-acre mixed farm – 15 acres of forestry, 10 acres of mixed pasture, and the remaining land for seed production and nature corridors. There is a small number of cattle used for beef for the home and customers in the local community.
“I don’t like the 'us and them' thing, organic farming over here and chemical farming over there,” Ms Cairns said.
"Ultimately, people have a lot of negative associations with organic agriculture. It’s not seen as real farming.”
Best-case scenario, Ms Cairns said, “it would be unheard of" if the amount of land under organic production in Ireland increased to around 5%.
“Imagine the amount we put into trying to create markets for dairy; imagine we put that into creating markets for organics - it’s all about where your priorities are," Ms Cairns said.
“Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your priorities.
“All of how we farm is directly incentivised by department policy, that is the reality.
“What we’re trying to do is make a living and it’s up to our Department of Agriculture to create markets, to create a sustainable food system that means farmers can make a living."
Ms Cairns is adamant that any policy changes in agriculture, especially those around environmental impact and reducing emissions, don’t “have to mean a cliff-edge for farmers”.
“If the Government was serious about making a shift and supporting farmers in doing it, it could benefit everybody and most importantly, the next generation of farmers," she added.
“Farmers instinctively know that the way agriculture has gone is not sustainable - they know better than anyone.
“There’s a lack of respect for farmers and we need to rebuild that nationally as well.”
