Two-thirds of our farmers are sustained by off-farm income of some kind, much of it wives' work, writes Kathy Sheridan.
As a child, I recall a sodden autumn when a neighbour developed a sad little dawn ritual. He would open the curtains and if the rain was still driving down, he would close them again - and leave them closed.
Years of careful husbandry, scrimping and hard labour in all hours and weathers rotted in the earth that year. He tried to avert his eyes as a year's livelihood turned to mush in the relentless rain.
Thirty years on, another dawn, and it was my husband and I who sat listening to the thrumming rain, the stormy tail-end of Hurricane Charlie. For urban folk, it was a spectacle. For us, it was the heart-sinking sound of a substantial pea crop - a partial but expensive diversification away from the traditional cereals, as advised by myriad experts - being hammered to the ground.
In a series of bad harvests, our only communication from government was a demand for land tax, which was gathered up somehow and duly paid.
Yes, dear reader, it was my decision to marry a farmer. And our decision to fight the silly odds. Discount the debts mounting against borrowings at terrifying interest rates, and the efforts to extract further stocking loans to fund the next crop, and we were probably no worse off than many at that time.
None of this is special pleading, nor an attempt to justify a crazy subsidy system. But this week, it seems necessary to illustrate why investing €50,000 in food production is not the same as running a shoe shop. A shoe-seller can change his stock five times a year in response to the market; a farmer has one throw of the dice. At the end of a lousy sales period, €10,000 worth of shoes are still worth their leather at least; €10,000 worth of sodden wheat or potatoes is mush.
The flight from the land has been gathering pace over decades. Farmers' children have been fleeing abroad or to the cities, where the clever ones used the pounds scraped together by parents along with Government grants (for which they will never be forgiven) to get a third-level education.
Settled in the cities, they enjoy a fabulously costly, Exchequer-funded, infrastucture with a choice of schools, colleges, hospitals, entertainment and amenities their country cousins can only dream about. In their city home, they may well be sitting on an asset as valuable as the farm they left behind, a point worth remembering amid the calls for farm assets to be included in means tests.
Imagine if for tax assessment purposes, a civil servant's des res in Clontarf and index-linked State pension were classed as income? Remember the short-lived property tax?
Suggestions that troubled farmers should sell off assets just as any troubled shoe-seller has to do, again miss the point. A shoe shop can be re-drawn as a burger joint or sex emporium. Farmers have sites and any attempt to cash them in will find An Taisce perusing the planning application almost before it hits the planner's desk.
In the meantime, two-thirds of our farmers are sustained by off-farm income of some kind, much of it wives' work. Bizarre as it sounds, his farm income plus her off-farm earnings combined are the basis for the Department's assertion that farmers net the average industrial wage.
Imagine if the ASTI's case for a salary hike was rejected on the basis that many of them were married to say, gardaí, and so their overall household income was grand altogether? Even more bizarre is the Minister's effort to class input costs as income.
No one benefits from masking the truth. But while the Department spins, farmers remain notoriously secretive, even among themselves. The picture is further blurred by the fact that farms in the Burren and the Golden Vale have as much in common as a cat and an elephant. But generally, farming's many critics could no more sustain their lifestyle on a farm income than wring a turkey's neck or herd 40 cows in for milking, knee-deep in muck, on Christmas morning.
Why so little focus on the massive profiteering beyond the farm-gate? Farm milk prices are at a 10-year low. Where is this reflected in the shops and restaurants?
But farmers also have some explaining to do. What they produce is neither rare nor unusual and no one owes them a living. Why is New Zealand lamb so plentiful in English supermarkets, with Ireland only 40 miles away? Why have plans for the upgrading of the beef industry been left to moulder?
Why be so coy, individually, about incomes - is there no sense that the taxpayer is owed an explanation? If their case is sound, why is John Dillon and his sophisticated organisation unable to make it, intelligibly and persuasively, without enraging motorists ?
Does any of it matter? Should it bother us if farm families abandon the countryside en masse for the commuter belt; if builders continue to buy up the land to offset taxes or offload rubble (really); or if restaurants increasingly serve up dodgy imported meat?
There are good reasons why it should. But on Day Four of the tractorcade, are we any the wiser about anything?