Steam rises hot and heavy in the kitchen. Silage day, and the men must be fed: boiled ham, roast chicken cooked in bacon fat. Potatoes start to take their jackets off. The woodwork sweats.
Mild winter means good harvests this year. The wasps have it easy. You open a window and they buzz straight in, so you learn to keep the window shut. My boss oversees her kitchen with eagle eye, measuring her worth by the quality of the spread.
The men enter with the scent of labour on them, washing their hands outside in the back porch. I hand round buttered bread, a job ranked for 12-year-old girls. A strange comfort, wearing such old gender clothes; the silage too heavy for women, the cooking too subtle for men.
The sounds of the cattle, the haystacks curling in gold chrysalis pods are about to become fodder for memories only. This is the last silage day on a small farm in north Mayo. No point, no future, children with better things to be carrying on. Ten more years, and the number of full-time farm families all over the island may be reduced to a mere 20,000. A few years ago they totalled 146,000. Good riddance, the mean-lipped may say. Think of the grants they got, the traffic their marches disrupted. Money for old rope.
Another £10 billion of it over six years announced by the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Joe Walsh, this week. But to whom will it go, and why? The more money is thrown, the less clarity lights up the problems. It is a matter of economics, yet a crisis in culture, too.
BUCKETS of scorn or nostalgia won't whitewash that challenge. With 10 minutes left to the 2010 midnight deadline set in the provocative Agri-Food Report, the land is losing its sense. Mr Walsh and his Department offer a vision of the future wrapped up in a 200-point plan.
If their document was a CAO application, it might just about win them a place in a technical school. Coming from central government policymakers with almost a century's traditions of planning for rural life and agriculture, it looks like bureaucracy on the road to God knows where.
Within three years, EU and CAP negotiations will radically alter the global picture in which rural Ireland plays a small part. Yet the complications of how rurality and agriculture are managed make it simpler for the urban majority to look the other way.
Not our business, no one cares, and some of us sneeze in the country. But sidelining rural Ireland from the main stage of national debate makes all sides and everyone vulnerable. The continued absence of an integrated, inter-agency strategy for the west in particular means that in 10 years' time its only function could be as a leisure zone for jaded townies, with former farmers employed to work as its museum guards.
The Council for the West, especially Marian Harkin and Bishop Tom Finnegan, argue powerfully that making targeted urbanisation a priority will not invigorate the land and people on its own. Targeted towns are booming, as anyone can see on a brief Sunday drive. That's the easy way, not necessarily the best or only one.
North Mayo is disabled, staying with those limited terms. Pee Flynn's famous road gives transport a reasonably smooth drive as far as Castlebar. Then it stops. Up further, you're talking worse roads, and an uneven social infrastructure to support what industrial development could happen. Erris, Belmullet, Killala, even blossoming Ballina and its hinterland are seriously out of reach. Grants for roads reached only £1.17 million this year, according to the Minister, Tom Moffatt. A bog roads allocation of £9,200 for the entire county made headlines. That should fix one whole kilometre.
THE EMPTY Asahi factory outside Killala is a parable of why such limited thinking hasn't worked, and won't in the future. Built during the 1970s on land sold reluctantly in the long-term interests of the community, the building squeezed tax relief and grants, promised years of employment in return and then packed up faster than an old car. Now its facilities are obsolete, its grounds unable to keep the swell of nature from the doors. You could call it asset-stripping, if you were cynically inclined.
If the same fate happens to the almost Messianic discovery of natural gas off north Mayo, you can kiss goodbye to developing this neglected region. No politician, civil servant or senior manager in Bord Gais has committed themselves to sharing the Corrib Field resource with the people who live there.
Instead, the board's Ger Breen spoke in Ballina in terms that made some locals shudder. Reading between the lines, it is clear that the board will prioritise big towns and big clients on strictly commercial terms. North Mayo may not even be eligible to apply. No energy, no industry.
The guff about an Ireland where imaginary rural values ruled was precisely that. But the countryside and people can't be punished for failing to deliver somebody else's myth. Whole swathes of it will soon start to mean little more than drive-by viewing - hey look, kids, that's nature, just like it shows in the books - or quick possibilities for a couple of housing sites. Thousands of acres owned by a few wealthy families, just as it used to be.
The sense of place generations of rural living builds up is being lost, along with the rituals. Overnight ribbon development in previously sleepy towns is generating replicas of mediocre Dublin suburbs.
Back in the kitchen, the temperature's rising. The boss tells me things are better than they were. Two generations ago their most wanted commodity amounted to an outdoor toilet. Life, she reckons, is becoming en-suite these days. But north Mayo is still being flushed away.
mruane@irish-times.ie