FARMERS being cast as ‘bad guys’ – even though they don’t oppose environmental policies – was a main source of stress for the farming community, according to the findings of a research study.

The study – carried out by Teagasc and Dublin City University [DCU] – highlighted the dilemma facing farmers in relation to previous Government guidelines to increase production and later ones to scale this back.

“Importantly, participants didn’t oppose environmental policies on principle. Instead, negative feelings stemmed from a sense that recent policies cast farmers as the bad guys, for following previous guidelines, rather than recognising their important role,” the latest edition of the Teagasc TResearch magazine states.

According to one of the authors of the study – Joseph Firnhaber, a Teagasc Ashtown Research Adviser – an important element for farmers in maintaining their wellbeing and resilience was in identifying and determining the uncertainty of farming.

“A useful concept to understand how this uncertainty may impact farmers’ health is liminality which is the experience of being caught on the threshold between one thing and the next, caught in the midst of rapid changes.

“While this [liminality] can be stressful, it can also present people with the opportunities for personal, mental or career growth.

“Therefore, we aimed [in the study] to identify sources of occupational stress or wellbeing for Irish farmers, particularly regarding change in their lives and communities,” Joseph Firnhaber stated.

The Teagasc/DCU project involved collecting data from individual online interviews with 17 farmers as well as interviews with farming focus groups.

According to Joseph Firnhaber, four central narratives emerged from the data collected – three of them negative and one positive.

The negative factors were Rapid Change, Governance Standards and Rural Isolation while ‘the positive’ was Wellbeing from Farming, involving working with their family, nature and animals and being active.