Volume 9, Number 1

Developments in modern agriculture have led to doubts regarding the long-term viability of current production systems. The changing structure of the Irish farming sector is part of a European wide trend where the emerging model of agriculture is one comprised of a small number of highly developed commercial farmers and a larger number of rural households who obtain income both on and off the farm. Early studies viewed the take up of off-farm employment as a temporary adjustment processa way of supplementing farm income when it was low, but that view has been replaced over the last decade by research that notes its persistence over time. The importance of assessing the effect of this trend is manifold. Off-farm employment among farm households affects farm organisation, the future structure of agriculture, public policies to aid farming families, public policies to maintain rural communities and the delivery of educational and training services to the farming sector. Introduction The contribution of agriculture to national wealth and viability of rural areas in the Republic of Ireland is immense. When adjustment is made to official statistics for export refunds and import content of agricultural products, Irish agricultural exports account for approximately 30% of all net exports (Sheey & O’Connor, 1999). The agri-food sector, however, is in a state of change. Its contribution to the national economy, while still of considerable importance, continues to decline. In 1999 the agri-food sector employed over 8% of the Irish workforce, down from 11% in 1995 and accounted for £2,322m in terms of Gross Agricultural Product at factor cost down from £2,616m in 1995 (Dept. of Agriculture, 2000). Aggregate income from agriculture was £1,637m in 1999, a reduction of 12.3% over 1998. External pressures on the farm household are expected to persevere. Policy issues such as the further reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), enlargement of the European Union (EU) and trade agreements, will figure prominently in coming years. Total economic growth in Ireland has increased substantially in recent years. As this occurs farm labour and management are confronted continually with the necessity to adjust resource use in response to the squeeze between the inelastic demand for the product and rising labour opportunity costs. The push for such adjustments from the farm labour supply side is affected by the nature of farming while the pull from the labour demand side is affected by the nature of the general industrial economy. Part of the adjustment takes the form of migration of labour out of agriculture and part emerges as dual employment. At production level, many factors shape the future of the Irish agricultural sector. The most fundamental of these is the narrowing of the margin between costs and prices in productionotherwise known as the price-cost squeeze. Numerous other factors also have come to have a profound influence on the production practices of the farm householdincluding concerns for animal welfare, labour shortages and more recently the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopithy (BSE) crises. It is not surprising, therefore, that farmers are relying less on their farm incomes. The Household Budget Survey, last conducted in 1994/95 by the Central Statistics Office, shows that 53% of farm household income came from farming, 31% from other employment, 12% from transfers and the remaining 4% from other sources. Looking at National Farm Survey data over the last few years, and the increasing percentages of farm households with off-farm employment (up to 47% of households where operator or spouse had off-farm employment in 1998, from 36% in 1995), leads us to believe that the relative income from farming continues to decline. Purpose A changing target population requires that services provided for that population must adapt. The purpose of this paper is to examine how agricultural education and training services should react to rising levels of off-farm employment in the farming population. It will explore various factors that are associated with