The young farmers of today have to be grateful for all the options they have, and we see this too in the number of young women going into farming, which is going though the roof.

It’s brilliant to see. But I do sometimes think of the women of the 70s, 80s, and 90s who broke through the glass ceiling to own their own farms.

However, in the early 2000s it was still only 12%.

But these women who went before, in my opinion, have been forgotten. In the media they are just a number, but let’s hear from the real women behind the numbers, and listen to what they have to say.

I do think of my own mother, who inherited the farm I am working on now in the late 1990s.

The woman who worked night and day with my late father to make the farm work, while also holding down a full-time job and everything besides, with me in school and doing sport and everything in-between.

My mother had the herd number, that she took over from my grand-uncle and took the farm forward.

When we changed over to milking in 2015, my mother was in the parlour with me and my father. When we were in the beef side of it, my mother went into the mart with the cattle and went in to the seller’s box beside the ring.

No-one questioned my mother, and no-one asked. ‘Where’s the real boss?’, because they knew it was her.

Dad used to buy beef calves in the mart and when he brought them home, my mother went straight down the yard to get the milk powder for them.

Let’s remember, this could be at 9pm, 10pm at night. She could have put me to bed and gone out to the farm, and then gone to bed herself and then turn around to go out the door again at 6:30am for work. It was not easy.

But the more I write this up, the more I think why these amazing women are not recognised today?

Not to say they were not recognised, but recognise them now for the work they did to keep Irish agriculture going. It’s up to young farmers of today to recognise these women.

We look around us today, even on my own farm, where my partner works with me.

It will be the third generation of women working on this farm: my grandmother, my mother, and my partner have all worked the land, and I’d say there are not too many farms in Ireland can say that.

The young women are driving on in leaps and bounds; there are so many working in Macra and other farming organisations, and they are helping drive on the next generation.

But we all have to be grateful for the ones that came before us.