I was tempted to cover our farm in solar s - here's why I turned it down

Being at a crossroads in life can indicate crisis, choice, change of direction, or simply uncertainty.

I’m not sure if I’ve arrived at such a place yet - maybe I’m still walking down the boreen or highway towards decision-making.

Putting things off or on the long finger - they call it procrastination I think - well, it was never a trait that I embraced, but cometh the hour, cometh the man. Life moves on, and truly things never stay the same.

Yes, change is inevitable, like night following day, and refusing to accept any change is like trying to hold back the ocean waves.

In mythology, King Canute made a valiant but vain attempt to hold back the sea. Being a natural conservative, I it I like certainties in life - old ways and old ways of doing things appeal to me. Like I have three different ‘good’ pairs of tros, yet the one I love to wear most of all is threadbare, must be ten years old -pockets long since replaced along with the zip and yet I’m mad about it -familiarity breeds content, at least in my situation anyway!

Look, I’m not facing any immediate existential crisis of any sort, but the years are moving on and planning for the future needs to be done.

Our family came here to this farm in either 1869 or 1870 - that was my great grandfather. By all s, there were always cows being milked here and to the best of my knowledge - learned and handed down - the farm was never without cows.

Logically, therefore, it’s possible, nay likely, that the bovine ancestors of our small milking herd were grazing these acres long before the Arnolds arrived!

The cows are an intrinsic part of the place, and not having them here is a prospect I try not to think about as time goes on. What’s the future for cows, for dairy farming, indeed for any type of farming in Ireland?

Climate change has arrived with a bang and even the ‘Climate Change Denialists’ have to now accept the inevitable reality. Price volatility is another major negative - the price of milk or beef or grain can fluctuate wildly, as we have seen in recent years. Another factor that cannot be measured or ‘future-proofed’ is the ever-increasing raft of rules and regulations that seem to be forever coming down the line.

They say one should ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth’ and when you get ‘an offer you can’t refuse’ - take it! ‘You’d be made for life’, was how one person described the proposals put before me last week.

Look, I know as much about solar energy and solar farms as the present Pope knows about hurling - very little. ittedly, I’ve heard talk in the last year or two about the ‘new way’ when it comes to renewable energy.

I had always thought that using timber as an energy was the ultimate in renewables - trees are cut or branches cut, they grow again and the cycle can be repeated over the years. How things have changed in a very short term.

The Government has set targets for 5, 10 and 20 years as regards the percentage of energy we can obtain from fossil fuels like coal, oil and turf - an ever decreasing ultimate target.

In fairness, I can’t really quibble with trying to help improve our climate, and no doubt manufacturing energy from a renewable source seems to be the way to go. Wind, water, waves and sunshine are really high upon the ‘good’ list in of producing electricity, for example, and ‘leaving no trace’.

The windmills or turbines were ‘flavour of the year’ with the last decade but now the solar seems to be top of the list.

So when a company representative comes into the haggard and suggests that my future might not be in farming as I have known it over the last 50 years, but in having a farm or portion of it covered in solar s - well, lads, I can tell ye, I was gobsmacked.

So if I signed up say to long-term lease 50 acres of my farm for 20 years to this energy company, I’d get €57,500 a year for the next two decades! ‘Twas a good job I was sitting down!

Whew, that’s some money alright - even if I’d to pay half of it in tax ’twould be still be more than €600 a week!

For this financial bonanza, 50 acres of the farm would be taken out of any kind of agricultural production for good - they say 20 years, in reality there would be no going back.

Was I tempted? Maybe for the few minutes the solar man talked the talk - that’s his job and he’s good at it.

Back in 1990, we planted the Glen over to the Blessed Well with ash and oak trees - the Glen was steep and had only grown briars and bushes for decades previously. In fairness, when we planted the trees we hadn’t any ‘Grand Plan’ of making a fortune from timber growing.

I love trees and I thought that in time we might be able to sell some ash hurley-butts to produce top class hurleys, and we’d never again be short of firewood.

In fairness, when the Farm Forestry Scheme was brought in back then, we got a small each year for 20 years. We were in at the very start of the scheme so we got only a cheque for around £300 each year - a few years later the yearly was tripled, but not back-dated to 1990 unfortunately!

Then, in 2010, when our last cheque was due - it always came in March and was handy to fill ‘the hungry gap’ at that time of year - well, we got a surprise and a bit of a land when a cheque for over €5,000 arrived- we thought all our Christmases had come together and that it was ‘back money’ for all the years.

Our joy was short-lived. Within an hour of the postman disappearing up the boreen we got a phone call from the Forestry Department explaining a mix-up. Another farmer had got our cheque and we had got his - he had about 200 acres of trees planted!

Anyhow, our ash trees are dying now. I asked the solar man could I put two acres of these solar s in the Glen - no, he really wasn’t interested in little plots like that.

We talked about it over the weekend and came to the conclusion that whatever farming enterprise we might pursue in the coming years -milking cows, rearing goats, growing cabbage plants, saving and selling hay or suckler farming - that the solar idea was not for us.

Outside the chapel gate after Mass on Sunday, it was the topic of conversation. What if a person ‘took’ the solar s for the big money and the company went bust or was sold off? What if some new technology overtakes solar energy in 10 or 15 years - what good would the signed contract be then - imagine taking on some multi-national corporation in the European Court!

Look, any farmer can basically do what he or she likes with their land, but the idea of taking top class land out of food production and covering it with steel and glass mirrors just seems wrong to me.

Imagine if a whole swarth of countryside was converted into solar farms - no more birdsong, plenty flooding from the run off, and an absolute blight visually on the green Irish countryside.

I pity anybody who might have moved to the countryside in recent years and might now find themselves surrounded by acres and acres of these solar s.

The other thing my simple mind cannot understand is that, on the one hand renewable energy is supposed to be the way to go, yet an interconnector bringing electricity from across to the East Cork coast is now under construction. I always thought that much of ’s energy came from nuclear power plants’ - that’s the way the French do it and we can’t argue with that.

My point is surely there’s a glaring contradiction between the huge push in Ireland for the so-called renewables and yet we can bring in electricity of ‘mixed’ and dubious origin from ?

No, I didn’t sign the lease contract and am not losing any sleep thinking about the big annual cheque.

If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.