Defining the undefinable

Ask anyone to define a farmer, and you are likely to get any number of definitions. Even within the narrow confines of activity, the list is long and variable. Food producers within the broad confines of crop production are an automatic inclusion, as are livestock owners who produce animals for meat and ancillary products. Forest owners are farmers, producing trees for fuel and fabrication. They are energy producers as well as carbon storage facilitators. As energy producers, should landowners who have solar, biomethane or wind turbines structures on their land be described as farmers? In Ireland, where the equine industry is so important a part of the rural landscape, those engaged in horse and other equine pursuits are reasonably included as members of the farming community.
All of this might otherwise be described as an abstract defining process of limited value, except for the fact that the definition of a farmer is about to become a centre-stage debate in the upcoming negotiations around the next iteration of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Even then, it would be a perennial and peripheral discussion except for the very important fact that the budget for Europe’s CAP is about to become even leaner. With ever less funding available, there is an inevitability that some previous recipients are about to lose out in the dispersion of scarce funding.
There have been as many proposals around the definition of a farmer as there are organisations representing farmers, and that need only apply to Irish farming groups.
Cast the net across the European Union and the defining criteria for a farmer become astonishingly complex. A two-acre olive producer in Portugal is readily accepted as a legitimate farmer. In Ireland, a proposal from the ICMSA to define a livestock farmer as a person with a minimum stocking rate of one livestock unit per hectare (LU/ha) has been criticised by the ICSA who would prefer to include those with a livestock stocking rate of 0.1LU/ha or higher. Another, looser, definition of a farmer that will inevitably require significant refining, has been advocated by the IFA, as being a person who is actively engaged in farming. Basically, any activity requiring a hands-on working relationship with agricultural land. Additional criteria include time commitment, and economic activity or output.
More provocative proposals around whether landowners should qualify for EU payments would exclude those who are in receipt of State pensions. Given the age profile of Irish, and indeed, European farmers, that would exclude a large cohort of people otherwise generally recognised as legitimate farmers under any standard definition. An essential aspect of defining a legitimate farmer is the proportion of income gleaned from farming. Full time farmers, whatever their income, automatically qualify under any definition of a farmer. Even that scenario, however, deserves further scrutiny. A spouse may own a landholding, while earning or producing very little, while the other half brings in a far higher income from outside activities. Now look at the many thousands of part-time farmers who earn far more from their off-farm jobs than they could ever hope to earn from their farming activities. Depending on farm enterprise, efficiency and scale, farming hours worked may be a relatively small proportion of total hours engaged in off-farm economic activity, and if the farm delivers less income than the off-farm activity, that person would not qualify for CAP payments under some farmer definitions being touted. Adding up total household income, often dwarfing the income from the farm, adds another complexity to simplistically defining a farmer under farming income, output, or activity criteria. Ultimately, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ farmer definition would be neither acceptable nor equitable.