I'm sure i said it earlier in the thread over the years, the Greens need to be talking to all of Ireland, they need to answer every question with a response that talks about why they're good for the lives of farmers.
Their PR is pretty awful, but i'm not sure how much of that is
A: FFG PR megamachine making sure they don't get airtime when they do something good
B: keeping the auld head down to get a few decent bits of legislation across rather than making the govt look like shit all day and then having to sit in an office with them.
But yes - Farmers hate them because they represent the reality check that that they don't want - from what i've gathered living in the sticks for a few years farming is now mostly renting land and contracting huge tractors to farm the land and betting on the price of product annually while holding down a civil service job and getting a few grants to reduce the risk or being a megafarmer - organics being a little slice of the pie of course.
You see a protest by farmers now and all the machinery is 80000 - 200000 euro tractors that eat carbon and stop them having to do any manual labour. Midsummer here i can hear those things coming along around 2 mins before they pass the house because the turbo is sucking air into the combustion chamber at jet engine levels, mixing it with diesel and churning it out. I'm sure you hear them down your way, you dont hear an engine, you just hear constant air intake. And thats before you even look at how pointless beef is. Everything is petrochemicals. Farmers hate the greens as a policy because it means they have to look in the mirror while talking out of both side of their mouths. The greens kinda have to tell them that 200,000 euro worth of massey ferguson hardware is essentially a big lump of scrap in the longterm just like they have to tell me i've got 4 grands worth of scrap in the driveway and its pretty much unsellable.