By 2015, there will be just over 100,000 farmers in the Republic of Ireland, writes Fintan O'Toole. Even this is something of an exaggeration, for the overwhelming majority of economically-viable farms will be ones on which either the farmer or his or her spouse works in some other job. Already, about 42 per cent of Irish farmers are part-timers.
Even in rural Ireland, farmers are now a shrinking minority: farming families make up just a third of the rural population. For many, especially those who are middle-aged or elderly, loneliness and isolation are increasing, as people, even in their local villages, have less and less in common with their way of life.
This reality is hard to grasp for urban people of my age, who grew up at a time when the farmer was lord of the land. That time is not so very distant - Irish entry to the European Economic Community sent a surge of money and confidence through Irish agriculture in the 1970s. Farmers had clout. Their votes determined political power. Their cultural and social conservatism held sway: divorce, for example, couldn't be allowed because it might affect the passing on of the family farm from one generation to the next. Their culture constituted the national mainstream.
Their day shaped everybody's day - the clock (as it still does) went back and forward to ensure enough light for early-morning milking. And farmers revelled in their power.
They paid no taxes at a time when PAYE workers were being milked for every penny, but made sure that the system of higher education grants was rigged to ensure that their sons and daughters got to university.
Many townies therefore feel about the decline of the Irish farmer as Oscar Wilde did about the death of Little Nell: that it would take a heart of stone not to be moved to laughter.
Since farmers always told us that they were barely staving off famine even when the good times were rolling, many of us have developed a complete immunity to their complaints.
But something fundamental is happening, and we should at least be talking about it.
The most probable outcome of current trends is that we will end up with a tiny elite of very wealthy industrial farmers. In a Darwinian evolution, the traditional smallholdings will disappear and a few tens of thousands of highly-efficient operators will gobble up the land and the quotas. For many free-market economists, this is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But the current bird flu scare in England should at least make us think about what's happening. When you put environmental sustainability and food security into the equation, the sums look a little different.
I spend as much time as I can in the Burren, and for a long time I thought of it as a beautiful natural landscape rather rudely interrupted by farming. Then, in 2003, Brendan Dunford's pioneering study Farming and the Burrenturned this whole notion on its head. He showed that the biggest current threat to the fabulous biodiversity of the region is under-grazing. The landscape was created by Neolithic farmers who cut down the trees and sustained by modern farmers who grazed their livestock in the winter on the sparse upland areas. The grazing is vital: without it, the fields are colonised by scrub or hardy grasses that choke the more delicate flora and the ecological richness is lost. As the old farmers retire, winter grazing ceases, the scrub takes over, and a unique environment declines.
This process is not irreversible. The chairman of the Burren branch of the Irish Farmers' Association, Michael Davoren, is both a realist and an idealist - realistic enough to know that small-scale farming as a purely economic activity is dead, and idealistic enough to believe it can be replaced by a notion of "farming for conservation".
Burren IFA, along with Teagasc and the Parks and Wildlife Service, has built the Burren Life project on the back of Brendan Dunford's research, and it is an outstanding example of the conceptual revolution that can bring hope and meaning back to old-style Irish farming.
This winter, for the first time in years, cattle are back grazing on the traditional Burren winter grounds. Enthusiasm for the project has been overwhelming - farmers, embracing the sense of purpose and the company of their neighbours, have been getting stuck in to the hard physical graft (much of it done by hand) of clearing scrub and restoring disused paths, walls and water stores. The generation of an income goes hand-in-hand with the sustaining of the environment and a value is restored to local knowledge and pride in the land.
It is easier to do this, of course, in the far-famed Burren than in Longford or Leitrim. But at least this project has drawn attention to the reality that the loss of a farming culture can have unintended consequences.
People like Dunford and Davoren have taken responsibility for identifying what needs to be saved and finding a way to keep it alive that involves more than merely demanding grants.
In a society that is increasingly careless of its assets, we need people who know what we've got before it's gone.