AGRICULTURE IN IRELAND

1500 TO 1690

In agricultural practice, as in social and political structures, Ireland in 1500 fell into two distinct zones, with a large transitional area in between. In the Pale counties (Dublin, Meath, Louth, most of Kildare, and part of Westmeath) and some outlying areas of the southeast, agriculture in general followed a typical Western European pattern, with a strong emphasis on tillage. In the purely Gaelic areas of the north and west, however, there was a much greater emphasis on pastoralism, and tillage tended to be a monoculture of oats. The difference between the plow of the former colonial areas and the more primitive “short plow” of Gaelic Ireland was notable. Although both were drawn by a team of four horses, hitched abreast, and led by a driver ahead, the short plow also required the services of a “beam-holder” to hold the front of the plow in the ground, and was usually drawn by being tied to the horses’ tails. There is evidence from County Louth of the occasional use of plow oxen in this period. By 1500 the old colonial areas seem to have universally adopted the three-course rotation of autumn-sown crop, spring-sown crop, and a fallow year in which the land was plowed but left unsown until the autumn. The autumn-sown crops were wheat, bere (six- or four-rowed barley) or, to a lesser extent, rye; the usual spring crop was oats, although peas, beans, and spring-sown barley are also recorded. So invariable was the three-course rotation that crops in these regions were universally reckoned in “couples,” a couple being the unit of an acre of autumn-sown “hard corn” and an acre of oats. In the transitional areas, as in the Gaelic regions, the low population and abundance of land could lead to the fallow year being extended for much longer. In the Gaelic regions it was usual to cultivate oats—the standard food crop—for two years and then to let the ground grow grass for several years. Flax was grown extensively, at least in the Gaelic regions, to supply the widespread linen trade, but as a crop grown in small patches by the poor, it was rarely noted. There is some uncertainty about the seventeenth-century spread of the potato. The surviving evidence suggests that Irish crop yields, at least in the Pale, did not differ appreciably from those in contemporary England, but there is no information on the ratio between seed sown and crops reaped.
The townland was commonly treated as an agricultural unit for cultivation or grazing; boundary banks were usual between townlands, while otherwise the fields lay open and unenclosed. When it was necessary to make enclosures to protect crops, this was done with fences of posts and wattles, with an expected lifetime of two years. In the agricultural zones there existed around the coasts a belt in which abundant supplies of seaweed for fertilizer made possible an intensive agriculture in which corn crops could be raised, year after year, from the same land. The evidence suggests that in this period and in many areas, both Gaelic and Old English, there existed a class of “rural capitalists” who cultivated large areas with the help of their dependents, laborers, and sharecroppers of varying status. Conversely, without the stock or dependents to adequately exploit it, land could be of little value to those who owned or worked it.

THE PASTORAL ECONOMY

In Gaelic Ireland pastoralism was more important than tillage. Its mainstay was cattle, which provided not only meat and milk products but also the hides that were Ireland’s principal export. Cattle were a mobile asset that could be quickly and easily moved to a safer locality in time of war as well as in search of fresh pasture. There has perhaps been too much readiness to identify all movements of the herds with transhumance (“booleying”), the movement from winter quarters in the lowlands to upland summer grazing. Gaelic legal custom allowed the grazing of unoccupied land either by the neighbors, if they were ready to pay tribute due to the lord out of the land, or by the lords themselves.
The adverse side of this mobility was the prevalence of cattle raiding or rustling, not only in time of war. The herds—the caoruigheachta or creaghts—were particularly large and mobile in Ulster. The Gaelic Irish did not make hay, and the practice was instead to leave certain lands unused during the summer to provide winter grazing for the cattle. Irish cattle of the period are described as small, a description supported by what information there is on dead weights, but there was a larger breed in eastern Ulster.
Sheep and pigs played a lesser role in the economy, but there is evidence of very large flocks of sheep in Munster. The native Irish sheep seems to have resembled the present Shetland breed, with a long coarse fleece, which was plucked in summer instead of being sheared and from which the famous Irish rug mantles were made. Pigs were fed on acorns in the woods in the usual European manner. To complete the pastoral picture, lords and other important persons kept great herds of mares for breeding purposes.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

From the time of the Munster Plantation of the 1580s, English settlers (the “New English”) moved into Ireland in large numbers, importing English agricultural techniques and the superior English breeds of cattle and sheep. Although interrupted by the Rising of 1641 and the subsequent wars, this immigration continued through the seventeenth century. The greater financial resources of the settlers, as well as their farming expertise, made English tenants as welcome on the lands of native Irish landlords as on those of the New English. Among the innovations that they brought were the liming of land with lime produced by burning limestone and the digging and spreading of marl, a lime-rich subsoil. The Irish before this time seem to have used only local sources of agricultural lime, such as seaside-shell sands and rare inland deposits of lime-rich sand. The coming of the settlers coincided with an expansion of the native population, leading to a more intensive utilization of the land and a shift from pastoralism to tillage. As a result of this, and of a timber trade supplied by unsustainable exploitation of Irish forests, the period saw a rapid clearance of woodland. It also saw the beginnings of the process of permanent enclosure, hastened by the increasing scarcity of wood for the traditional temporary fences. It is difficult to tell how far the imported techniques influenced the native Irish, but evidence indicates that in County Sligo haymaking was already common by 1638.
That English agricultural practices were not more widely adopted by the native Irish may have been due as much to lack of the necessary capital for innovation as to innate conservatism. The Scottish settlers in Ulster and the bordering regions, unlike the English, had little to teach the Irish in the way of tillage practices but the cattle which they brought with them were, to judge by their higher value, of a better breed than the native stock. The most striking development in seventeenth century Irish agriculture was the introduction of the potato. Research has shown that the potato, introduced into Ireland probably by merchants from the southern ports trading into Spain some time around 1600, must have been the Chilean variety, already adapted to a temperate climate, rather than the Peruvian, which required a longer growing season than was available in the British Isles (O’Riordan 1988). By the 1640s potatoes were being widely grown across the southern half of the country. The acid soils so prevalent in Ireland suited the potato, and it became an ideal crop for land reclamation. It was eventually to transform the hitherto unproductive wastelands of Ireland.
By 1700 over most of southern and eastern Ireland a class of large progressive farmers—usually of English origin—had emerged side-by-side with a native population, who were often relegated to the poorer lands and who continued to farm by traditional methods. Much of the Scottish settler population in Ulster resembled the latter class rather than the former.

1690 TO 1845

Between 1690 and 1845 a number of European regions experienced massive transformations from rural-based economies toward urban industrialization. The Irish economy, on the other hand, was still as strongly based in the countryside in 1845 as it had been a century and a half earlier. By the eve of the Great Famine the economy had changed utterly in its intensity and efficiency, supporting three or four times as many people as it had in the seventeenth century. However, it was still essentially a supplier of its own subsistence and an exporter of food to industrial Britain. Outside the textile center of the northeast, Ireland had no identifiably industrial regions.

UNSTABLE GROWTH: 1690 TO 1745

Like the rest of Europe in the 1690s, Irish agriculture was beginning a recovery from nearly a century of political and economic instability, war, depressed prices, and lackluster growth. The new colonial property system set in place during the course of the previous century, under which Scottish and English settlers owned approximately 80 percent of the land, was still taking root. The political upheaval of the previous century had left the native commercial classes in a shambles, with market and credit systems in an undeveloped state. According to William Petty, a trustworthy observer during this period, over 90 percent of profitable land was under grass in the 1680s. The production of crops was largely restricted to a region in the southeast of the country that had supplied wheat to Dublin and abroad. The mass of the rural population was still occupied in a pastoral, livestock-based economy that had not fundamentally changed for centuries.
The 1690s saw a promising resurgence of the agricultural economy, particularly in tillage, a trajectory of development that continued into the early eighteenth century. This modest growth was strongly influenced by the incentives and constraints of a framework of trade legislation that included the Cattle Acts of the 1660s, the various Navigation Acts passed in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Woollen Act of 1699, and the legislation of 1705 placing bounties on Irish linen exports. The Cattle Acts, which banned the export of livestock to England, and the Navigation Acts, which banned imports from the new world directly into Ireland, skewed Irish agricultural and industrial development.
Although the livestock export trade was shut down, the Irish were allowed to supply beef for the provisioning of Atlantic trading and war vessels. Prohibited from exporting either live sheep or woolen goods, Irish graziers responded by exporting raw wool. The textile industries in Ireland were largely suppressed by this legislation, with the crucial exception of linen. The legislation of 1705 allowed linen exports not only to England but directly to the American colonies and the continent as well.
The effect of this legislative framework was to create hothouse conditions for provisions and linen goods in the Atlantic economy. Rapid commercialization and increased specialization ensued. Linen production developed rapidly, with flax producers and importers supplying a far-flung network of rural handspinners whose output in turn supplied the growing ranks of farmer-weavers in the north. The business of cattle rearing saw rapid specialization and commercialization as well. A wide variety of producers—dairymen selling young cattle, small farmers who raised young cattle but also engaged in tillage farming, spinning, and/or weaving, and larger graziers buying two- or three-year-old cattle for maturing and final fattening for market—all interacted in a mushrooming network of markets and fairs. However, until the 1740s the countryside still proved to be tragically vulnerable to the type of subsistence crises that historians associate with a primitive economy. The high level of emigration to the New World, particularly by the Protestant population of the north, is additional evidence of this economic fragility.
The Atlantic shipping trade also fuelled the relentless deforestation of the Irish countryside to meet the demand for barrels, staves, and other equipment. The process began in the early seventeenth century but greatly increased in pace in the first half of the eighteenth, so that by the early nineteenth century Ireland had been almost completely denuded of its forests.

A GREAT ACCELERATION: 1745 TO 1815

The second half of the eighteenth century saw a tremendous expansion of this commercial agrarian economy. Two interrelated factors were important. First, Ireland began to play an important role in supplying food to the rapidly urbanized and industrialized British economy. By mid-century, food prices were rising sharply across England. By the 1770s Britain had become a net importer of food, and much of those imports came from Ireland.
By the end of the century Ireland was supplying over 40 percent of Britain’s imports of grain, meat, and butter, and by the 1820s this figure had reached 75 percent. Secondly, the liberalization of trade legislation removed the straightjacket constraining the economy in the first half of the century. The restrictions on Irish cattle exports were lifted by legislation in 1758. The Navigation Acts were mostly removed in 1778, though exports of crucial industrial products such as wool, woolen manufactures, and cotton were still prohibited. And in 1784 the Irish Parliament passed legislation consolidating a system of export bounties on agricultural products. Expanding pastoral production was an important component of the great acceleration of the late eighteenth century, but the real driving force was an explosion of tillage and textile production from the small farm sector. Linen remained the leading export. Unlike wool and cotton, its production methods remained labor-intensive and suited to cottage hand production throughout the eighteenth century. Most linen producers, whether they were flax growers, spinners, weavers, or all three, also tilled the land, producing oats or wheat for distant markets and potatoes and other garden crops for local consumption. To these may be added a third key component of small-farm land use: the quasiagricultural activity of harvesting turf.
Turf cutting and saving, worth nearly £2 million a year in 1840, provided not only cheap energy but opened up new cultivable land. Successive crops of potatoes prepared former bog for grain cultivation, and potatoes then became a permanent part of the rotation of grain cultivation, simultaneously providing subsistence and renewing the soil. Together, these activities formed an interlinked microeconomy that fuelled not only a great increase in output but also demographic explosion and a massive expansion in land use. The period of the Napoleonic wars, by artificially increasing and sustaining food prices in England, fanned the flames of an already roaring productive and demographic acceleration.

PRODUCTIVITY AND DISTRIBUTION: 1785 TO 1845

Between 1785 and 1845 the fruits of the agricultural economy were unevenly distributed. From the early eighteenth century on, profits flowed overwhelmingly into the hands of landowners, middlemen, and the large graziers and stockholders. The three decades after 1785 were golden years for substantial farmers, but the benefits trickled down even to the lower reaches of society, with real wages for farm and construction labor rising. Irish rural life in this era was crowded, dirty, and short of luxuries, but the inhabitants of the countryside were relatively tall, well fed, and long-lived. Though the nature of agricultural and hand textile work was often backbreaking and monotonous, Irish workers had considerably more leisure time than their counterparts in industrial Britain.
Research published in the 1980s shows that, by comparison to the rest of the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France, Irish agriculture before the famine was reasonably productive. But the nature of its productivity was peculiar and impoverishing. Ireland lacked a number of crucial features of agricultural efficiency obtaining elsewhere: centuries of farm enclosure and rationalization, strong urban industrial development to soak up excess rural populations, strong incentives for capital accumulation and a well-developed system for its circulation Nevertheless, the Irish climate gave rural producers unique endowments, and they were generally exploited effectively. Though its soils were poor, Ireland’s climate gives it a natural advantage in grass, and therefore in livestock, production. Though lacking in capital intensity, Irish agriculture made very effective use of cheap labor and capital-poor techniques (such as better weeding, more intensive spadework, and more intensive seeding) suited to rocky and wet soils.
The decades after Waterloo saw a reversal in the upward price trend in agricultural products that lasted until the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. In addition, technical advances in the mechanical wet spinning of linen yarn in the 1820s and the beginning of a shift in demand away from linen to lighter textiles painfully undercut the rural hand-spinning and weaving trades. While the corn law of 1815 offered some protection to Irish farmers from the prevailing trend in grain prices, the mass of the peasantry lacked access to sufficient land to produce grain and livestock efficiently. This scenario caused poverty and inequality to increase dramatically in the 1830s and 1840s. Grain producers with access to land were able to capitalize on a flooded labor market and produce crops profitably. Landless laborers, on the other hand, were faced not only with declining money wages but also with rising prices of land offered by farmers in “conacre,” on a short-term arrangement that allowed laborers to produce a subsistence crop of potatoes. These developments left a growing population in a position of heightened risk of impoverishment. Although Ireland was certainly not careening toward a Malthusian apocalypse in the 1840s, the structure of the economy, and the political and legislative circumstances that governed it, left the countryside completely vulnerable to the terrible shock of the potato blight in the late 1840s.

1845 TO 1921

The extraordinary decline in crop production and conversely the rise of cattle and milk production characterized Irish agriculture in the eight decades after the Great Famine. In land-use terms the country became greener. The hay and pasture acreage increased from nearly 10 million acres in 1851 to 12.4 million acres by 1911. Conversely, over the same period the cultivated acreage declined from 4.6 to 2.3 million acres. The wheat acreage alone declined dramatically from half a million acres in 1851 to 150,000 acres by 1881, and finally to 45,000 acres by 1911. There was a brief turnaround in these trends during the plough-up campaign during World War I: In 1918 the arable area recovered to 3.1 million acres, hay and pasture fell to 11.2 million acres, and wheat lands rose to 157,000 acres (this last slipping back to 43,000 acres by 1921). At its lowest level, in 1904, there were only 31,000 acres of wheat.
The only significant extension of the cultivated area occurred in response to the demand for animal-fodder crops. The turnip was formerly a neglected crop, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was grown in large quantities. The ratio of pasture to arable rose from 2:1 in 1851 to nearly 6:1 in 1921. By 1900 one-half or more of all land was under permanent grass. This move toward pasture occurred everywhere in Ireland. Land use captures the essence of agricultural change, but one specific regional observation might be made. For every hundred acres of hay and pasture (i.e.,per unit of the main animal food), it was the northern counties (Ulster) that had the greatest density of cattle in the middle to late nineteenth century. It was not until the turn of the century that the counties of the south and west came into their own as substantial cattle producers. This reflects the more mixed and highly developed farming systems in the north around midcentury, but it also suggests the potential that existed for larger change elsewhere. Mixed farming continued to characterize Ulster in the second half of the nineteenth century.

AGRICULTURAL OUTPUT AND AGRICULTURAL CHANGE

In terms of the value to Irish agricultural output, tillage represented nearly 60 percent of final output in the early 1850s, but it slumped more or less progressively thereafter to less than 20 percent by the late 1890s. Conversely, the share of livestock and livestock products rose from about 40 percent in the early 1850s to over 80 percent by 1900, and peaked at 84 percent in 1910. The cash crops of wheat, barley, and flax declined from between 8 and 5 percent of output in the early 1850s to only 1 or 2 percent each from the 1880s.  Potato output fell from a fifth or a quarter of output in the early 1850s to about 10 percent or less from 1860 onwards, and to an all-time low of about 5 percent in 1897. Conversely, cattle output rose from 20 percent in 1860 to over 30 percent by the late 1870s. Milk, as revealed in butter production, also accounted for 20 percent in 1860, though it declined after 1880 to about 18 percent. Therefore, the two components of cattle output contributed close to 40 percent of final agricultural output in the 1860s, rising to nearly 50 percent by the early 1870s, with a peak of 59 percent in 1903. By 1914 even hens and ducks added more to agricultural output than wheat, oats, and potatoes combined—crops that had contributed more than half of output in about 1840. The postfamine changes illustrated by these statistics were not induced by the famine alone. In fact, the total cultivated area rose during the first twenty years or so after the famine, but thereafter it declined. The severe decline in population from 6.55 million in 1851 to 4.39 million by 1911 helps to explain the fall in the cultivated area, but not entirely the changes within agriculture. Purely for the purposes of self-sufficiency a much smaller land area was adequate as the decades proceeded, but the population of animals actually grew in numbers. In other words, the developments in Irish agriculture were not just negative responses to the famine; they were also positive responses to other circumstances
The increase in North American grain reaching Western Europe at lower and lower prices by the late 1870s in an atmosphere of free trade may have led to the steep decline of corn growing in England, but in Ireland the economy had already adjusted output to cash products other than wheat before the 1870s. This is an important conclusion for the history of Irish agriculture, indicating that its reconstruction was ahead of that of many European rivals. While the flight from cereal production was pronounced in Ireland, in both Denmark and Germany there was actually an increase in the land devoted to cereals, and in France and Holland the cereal acreage held up very well.
External economic stimuli were increasingly important, but in Ireland, even on the eve of the Great Famine, the export trade accounted for as much as 27 percent of all Irish agricultural output. Thereafter it grew in response to the rise in demand for meat and dairy products generally in Western Europe, especially after the 1870s and particularly in Britain. At first, the milk and butter trades were important, but this gave way to the rising tide of fat-cattle and store-cattle rearing and export, especially after 1880. This was reflected in animal numbers.
Milch cattle constituted about 70 percent of all cattle over two years of age in 1855, but thereafter their numbers dwindled, falling to less than 60 percent by the end of the century and only recovering slightly thereafter. The export trades to Britain were at full steam. By 1908, 58 percent of the net value of livestock production came from exports. In the 1850s between 35 and 40 percent of the cattle that “disappeared” each year from the annual enumeration were exported to Britain, increasing to 50 percent in the mid-1860s and to 70 percent by the end of the century. From 1850 to 1875 annually between 30 and 50 percent of the sheep were exported, and more than 30 percent of the pigs were exported as live animals and an untold proportion in the form of bacon.

AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSIONS AS TURNING POINTS

Apart from the short-lived period in the mid-1850s during the Crimean War, when grain prices generally rose in Western Europe, giving some respite to the arable sector, there were two agricultural depressions in Ireland during the period. These were the depressions of 1859 to 1864 and 1879 to 1882. They have both been identified as watersheds in Irish agriculture, the first related to agricultural change, and the second very much associated with the tenant and landlord conflict known as the Land War. In the first period, for six continuous seasons, either grassland suffered from drought or the arable and fodder sector experienced either drought or too much rain.
Crop yields turned down dramatically, but now the price for such crops was influenced more by the larger British or European market than by conditions in Ireland itself. Coincidentally, the cotton famine spilling over from the U.S. Civil War gave a brief encouragement to Irish flax production, and for this reason alone the depression hit Ulster less severely than elsewhere.
The war also gave a brief respite to wool prices. But Ireland emerged from the depression finally realigned to pastoral agriculture. Before the depression the milk and butter trade was relatively ascendant, but it was already under threat from the cattle trade. The ratio of calves to milch cows declined from 45 per hundred in 1854 to only 34 in 1861, indicating the growing sale of calves to the veal trade and a greater concentration on milk and butter. Thereafter this ratio rose dramatically until in about 1865 it was 74 per hundred, and it remained at about 70 per hundred in subsequent years. The store-cattle trade had come into its own, and it flourished as the second half of the century unfolded. It has been suggested that for much of the third quarter of the century there was a rising tide of expectation in the agricultural sector, especially for the stability or even improvement of tenant incomes.
If true, this adds weight to the interpretation of the second depression, between 1879 and 1882, as a watershed in tenant landlord relationships. The rising tide was stopped and replaced by a disgruntled tenantry struggling to pay their fixed rents at a time when their incomes were in rapid decline. The ensuing rent arrears had consequences in terms of credit restrictions, credit worthiness, and the reduced incomes of the large service sector of shopkeepers and other suppliers on whom agriculture depended. The general malaise of relative and sometimes absolute poverty also hit landlords whenever their tenants were in arrears with their rents. The ensuing spate of land legislation resulted in a large transfer of ownership to the tenants. In 1870 perhaps 3 percent of Irish holdings were owner-occupied, but by 1908 the corresponding figure was about 46 percent.

AFTER WORLD WAR I

At independence in 1922 the agricultural sector in the Republic accounted for about one-third of the gross domestic product, just over half of total employment, and almost three-quarters of merchandise exports (Kennedy, et al. 1988). Economic growth over the past century has reduced the relative importance of agriculture dramatically. In the year 2000 it contributed 3 percent, 7 percent, and 6 percent of national output, employment, and exports respectively.
Similar trends can be observed in Northern Ireland, although the more industrialized status of the North has meant that agriculture there was always less important in the economy. It accounted for 2.6 percent of Northern output and 5 percent of employment in 2000. This shift from an agrarian economy to a predominantly urban, postindustrial one is the defining change in Irish society during this period. Although the declining importance of farming is something that Ireland shares with all developing economies, the particular pattern of adjustment that it experienced was influenced by a specific combination of historical legacy, market constraints, and policy interventions.

POST-WORLD WAR I TO 1960

The fortunes of the agricultural sector in the Republic over the past century can usefully be chronicled by distinguishing between three periods: spanning the early independence period from World War I to 1960; a brief burst of growth between 1960 and the mid-1980s; and a period of adjustment to tightening farm supports since then. In the period from the aftermath of World War I to around 1960 there was very limited growth in overall agricultural output. The policy dilemma throughout this period was that the pursuit of Ireland’s comparative advantage in grass-based cattle production conflicted with the social imperative of employment creation. Cattle farming had been substituting for tillage production since the middle of the previous century, but its limited labor requirements meant that it was accompanied by a substantial decrease in the demand for rural labor. The extensive nature of cattle farming was also unsuited to the structure of predominantly small, family-owned farms inherited as a result of the land reforms at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The promotion of efficiency in farming conflicted with the social objective of maintaining the maximum number of farm families on the land.
Successive governments responded to this dilemma in different ways. The Cumann na nGaedheal government (1922–1932) rejected any policy of widespread support to the sector on the grounds that in a predominantly rural economy the costs of farm support would fall largely on farmers themselves. Both internal and external circumstances changed in the 1930s. The onset of the Great Depression led to a general rise in protectionist barriers. Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932 on a platform of stimulating local industry, including arable agriculture, behind tariff barriers. Price supports were paid to encourage local wheat, dairy, and sugar production. The refusal to pay the land annuities led to the “Economic War” with the United Kingdom, in which Britain placed tariffs on imports of Irish cattle. The costs of this episode were largely borne by agriculture, which also saw its terms of trade fall during the period. The conflict ended with the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938, which relaxed access conditions for cattle to the U.K. market again.
Irish agriculture failed to capitalize on the U.K. market deficit during the Second World War, in part because input shortages limited the potential expansion in output and in part because the United Kingdom put monopoly-purchasing arrangements in place that limited the scope for price increases. The 1948 trade pact with the United Kingdom signalled a return to a more export oriented agricultural strategy. Though agricultural output slowly increased during the 1950s, intense competition in the main export market in the United Kingdom and inadequate attention to marketing meant that prices were depressed and farm incomes remained low.

THE PRODUCTIVIST PERIOD: 1960S TO MID-1980S

An important change in the Republic was the emergence of a nascent urban-based industrial sector in the 1960s, which allowed the possibility, for the first time, of significant net transfers to the farm population. Price guarantees were strengthened for dairy products and extended to beef under the terms of the 1965 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement. The next quarter-century saw a brief flowering of the “productivist” period in Irish agriculture. Deliberate efforts were made, under successive Programmes for Economic Expansion, to stimulate agricultural output through grant aid and other incentive schemes. Agricultural output responded; the output volume in 1970 was 31 percent higher than in 1960. But the growing budgetary cost of providing support would not have been sustainable without the benefits granted to the Republic by its membership in the European Union (EU) beginning in 1973.
Agricultural output per worker was marginally lower in Northern Ireland compared to the South in the 1920s, but the South subsequently lost most of its advantage. Indeed, over the period 1926 to 1962, output growth in the North of 150 percent contrasted with the growth of output in the South of just 30 percent (Ó Gráda 1994). The U.K. policy of free trade in grains stimulated farmyard-enterprise production in the North (i.e., pigs, eggs, and poultry), and beef and dairy farmers benefited from the introduction of postwar price supports in the United Kingdom. Southern agriculture suffered from policy disincentives in the 1930s, input shortages in the 1940s, and underinvestment in the 1950s, but with the increased protection given to farmers in the Republic in the 1960s, overall agricultural performance converged.
The importance of EU membership for the Republic lay not so much in the improved terms of trade for farm produce that access to the high-price EU market brought about, for this was quite short-lived. Rather, it was the fact that for the first time since World War I, Irish agriculture had unrestricted access to its main export markets. At the same time the cost of farm support was no longer borne by the Irish exchequer but by the EU taxpayer and consumer. Agricultural output continued to grow rapidly by a further 52 percent from 1970 to 1985. New technologies, including the use of fertilizers, silage-making instead of hay-making for forage conservation, improved animal breeds, and greater use of compound feeds, led to a marked improvement in productivity.  Average farm incomes narrowed the gap with nonfarm incomes and in some years exceeded them. Agriculture in the Republic also began to reverse the productivity gap that had emerged with Northern Ireland agriculture as successive governments in the South exploited the limited discretion available within the EU’s agricultural policy in favor of farmers, while policy in the United Kingdom (and hence Northern Ireland) tended to keep prices lower in favor of consumers. Not all farms shared in the growing prosperity. The modernization of farming was accompanied by the growing marginalization of the small-farm sector. A significant divide opened up between the larger farmers in the south and east of the country who were quick to adopt the new technologies and the smaller farmers in the more disadvantaged western region who fell farther behind. The self-sustaining nature of the small-farm economy began to break down as the deterioration in its relative economic position was reflected in a growing proportion of single, elderly farmers without immediate heirs. While the acceptance of off-farm employment became an increasingly important strategy for viability on smaller farms, a growing proportion of farm households disengaged from commercial agriculture and became increasingly dependent on state welfare payments to maintain their living standards.

TIGHTENING OF FARM SUPPORTS: MID-1980S TO THE PRESENT

The productivist period in Irish farming was relatively short, brought to an end in the mid-1980s by changes in EU farming policy. The costs to the EU of farm support were spiralling out of control, and increasing awareness of the environmental, animal-welfare, health, and food-safety consequences of intensive agricultural practices forced new concerns onto the policy agenda. The growth of milk output, which had expanded by 5 percent per annum over the previous two decades, was brought to a halt by the introduction of milk quotas in 1984. Grant aids for farm modernization were severely curtailed in the reform of EU structural policy in the following year.  The MacSharry and Agenda 2000 CAP reforms substituted direct payments for market-price support, but in doing so, they introduced effective ceilings on beef, sheep, and cereal output. The growth of agricultural output slowed from 2.6 percent in the period 1970 to 1985 to 1.4 percent between 1985 and 2000 and 0.7 percent between 1990 and 2000. Similar trends are evident in Northern Irish agriculture, although the strength of sterling in the second half of the 1990s relative to the euro and the difficulties caused for beef exports by the “mad cow” crisis have meant that farm incomes in the North have been under much greater pressure. Total income from farming at the end of the 1990s was less than half what it was at the beginning of the decade in real terms. On the threshold of the new century agriculture faces a number of challenges. Farm incomes, though comparable to nonfarm incomes on average, remain hugely dependent on subsidies or off-farm income.  EU farm-support mechanisms are under considerable challenge both externally, in the context of World Trade Organization negotiations on trade liberalization, and internally, because of the budgetary implications of extending these levels of support to farmers in the candidate countries of central and eastern Europe. Farmers also face the challenge of integrating environmental concerns into agricultural production, including stricter pollution regulations and the public’s desire for environmentally benign and animal-friendly (but technically inefficient) management practices. Farmers must also respond to the calls for traceability and quality production from consumers who, in light of an increasing number of health scares, want ever-higher standards of reassurance that their food supply is safe and wholesome. The role of agriculture may have shrunk in importance over the past century, but its capacity to cause controversy and debate remains undiminished.

By KENNETH NICHOLLS (1500 to 1690),  MARTIN W. DOWLING (1690 TO 1845), MICHAEL TURNER (1845 TO 1921) and ALAN MATTHEWS (After World War I)  in the book 'Encyclopedia of Irish History and Economy'- James S. Donnelly Jr. (Editor in Chief), MacMillan Reference U.S.A (an imprint of Thomson Gale), Farmington Hills, U.S.A, 2004, p.44-54. Edited and illustated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.