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Chapter 1: What are the impacts of rising oil prices on farming?
This is Countrywide on RTE Radio 1.
Hello, good morning. You're very welcome to the programme. Between now and nine, taking the diesel out of slurry spreading in Wexford, taking the oil out of fertiliser in Leash, taking fossil fuels out of farming everywhere, is the battery tractor ready to go? 8 degrees and blustery here, 26 degrees and contentious in the Straits of Hormuz as you've been hearing in the headlines there.
Farming is very much at the sharp end of oil price spikes and spikes just keep on happening. Listen to this list. 2008, global financial crisis, $147 a barrel. 2011, Arab Spring, $127. 2014, Libyan civil war, $111. 2022, Russia invades Ukraine, $122. $117 a barrel during this war, though it is at $95 today.
Do we keep on muddling along, pushing businesses to breaking point, tempers to boiling point and passing the bill to the taxpayer? Or should we spend this morning's programme exploring ways to wean ourselves off a clearly silly way of doing business if there are alternatives? It is slurry spreading season. Tractors running up and down fields for hours on end, sucking diesel from dawn till dusk.
So I spent some time this week with a contractor who specialises in slurry spreading to see what impact Trump's war in Iran and the government's three quarters of a billion euro subvention was having on his ability to stay in business. What's happening here then? So, we have our pump pumping out our slurry. Eamon is in the tractor, he has his flow meter.
He knows exactly what he's sending up to Paddy in the field.
Eamon sits in a tractor on top of a pit in a Wexford farmyard. It's pumping slurry into an umbilical pipe and pushing it under pressure one and a half kilometres away to the field that it's going to be spread in. The tractor engine is running at a constant 1,000 rpm, 35 litres of diesel an hour.
At the other end of the umbilical pipe, Pawdie is driving another tractor back and forth using a low-emission spreader. His tractor is running just under 1,000 rpm, depending on the terrain, and averaging about 25 litres of diesel an hour. So, 10,000 litres multiplied by 0.83 equals, so that did cost me 8,400.
In his little office perched above his machinery shed, contractor Irvin Rothwell is running his calculator at about 2,000 RPM. The increase in fuel costs over this week last year is about 75 euros a tractor a day. With eight tractors on the go right now, nine hours a day, fuel is costing him 4,200 euro more a week than last spring.
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Chapter 2: How is the slurry spreading process changing in modern farming?
I should have read it, shouldn't I?
You're all right, don't worry, yeah, yeah. That's it, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What if there was commercially viable battery alternative to that? Is that the way to future-proof your business against yet another one of these crises? Definitely.
I'm not an electric fan. I have all diesel cars. But every farmer's yard has massive big banks of roofs and they can put solar panels on it and they can hook up to the tractors and the tractor is at home the whole time. then move into contracting. We're a type of contractor who brings every machine home at night. So, yeah, possibly it might work.
Will it charge to keep a tractor going for 10 hours? That'll keep us going.
But then again, silage people out, tractors not coming home to site and all the rest of it won't work.
So you're telling me that you're at a point where you would be open to considering this technology, where you would have been sceptical in the past, perhaps?
Yeah, absolutely.
I would be open to thinking about it What's the point muddling our way through this crisis and not changing anything before the next one?
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Chapter 3: What are the financial challenges faced by farmers today?
There's 12 cows, 12 calves.
And they're all quite easy calving. Have you bred for that?
Oh, certainly, yeah. We've assisted two or three altogether, like, you know, so most of them we find calved in the morning.
Is a big part of organic and that philosophy of less inputs, less veterinary as well, less management...
Sure it is. Stress is what we try to cut out in man and beast as much as we can. So no dehorning, no castrating is a big part of cutting down on stress and stressing on the person as well because it's not a nice task for anyone.
Hopefully they won't react to too much. They're getting a bit of meal. They probably think they're getting meal now. So this is where all your straw goes, Keith?
Yeah.
So you need a lot of straw in an organic system to bed them on?
We do, yeah. We need a lot of straw. But then we think of it as value as well for dung, like, you know.
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Chapter 4: How can battery tractors be a solution for farmers?
It could be 1-2 million euros to start off with, a relatively small number of tractors, but the key objective now should at least be to put in place a programme that can deliver the first 2025 electric tractors to Ireland.
Allow me to play devil's advocate here, though. If you were sitting in the Department of Finance, might it not also equally make sense to say a wise man is just going to sit this one out and wait five, six, seven years for a secondhand market in these tractors to develop? And then we'll jump in.
It's not working in road haulage. If we look at trucks now across Europe, electric trucks are making up 5% of all new sales, 10% in countries with strong supports like Sweden, Netherlands and Norway. And in Ireland, it's 0.5% of the 2,700 new trucks bought in Ireland last year, 13 of them were electric.
So when you look at Netherlands and Sweden, and this applies particularly to the food sector, the milk tankers coming in through the farm gate, they're increasingly going electric. And that's... feeding a wider conversation within agriculture about electrification. But in Ireland, that whole conversation hasn't really started yet.
And that absence, I think, is particularly felt and was felt during the blockades themselves because there was very little conversation around the electrification of vehicles used in agriculture and food. That absence is increasingly felt, I think.
I frame this conversation as being a way of avoiding price spikes where it goes over $100 a barrel in the future. But is that to not understand where we're going to be in the future from now on? What do you think is going to be the baseline price here? Is it going to go back down to $30, $40 a barrel at any point?
Well, actually, if we look back over the last five years, and that included the price spike in 2022 with the further invasion of Ukraine... If you look back over those five years, oil actually came very close to averaging $80 a barrel over that period. Okay, roughly 100 now. What will it be for the next five years? What will it average now?
I mean, it's very difficult to predict that it would be far below 90, given that we're just out of a period where it's been 80. So, yeah, I think the 40, 50 dollars a barrel days are well over.
I think right now in Ireland, just to go back to the average dairy farmer we talked about earlier, I don't think many of them really fully adjusted to a 9,000 euros a year projection every year for diesel into the future. That's a huge jump from 5,000 over the past five years.
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