However, when you sit down and think about this latest U-turn, you can see the logic.

If water quality is one of the key issues that farming — and in particular dairy farming — is falling down on, then we’ve got to try to reduce the amount of pollutants getting into the water.

In this case, we all know that the pollutant is the stuff coming out the back end of the cow. The excretions from the front-end are another day’s work.

Looking out the rain-speckled window over the last week, I can imagine how that rain is washing laneways beautifully clean, but the idea of the dung and urine from 1.4 million dairy cows being washed into waterways, regardless of how small, is an obvious weak link in the system.

Beef, sheep and tillage farmers all have to abide by the same rules, but this really isn’t an issue for them. They don’t hunt their herd along kilometres of laneways four times a day, every day for the next five months.

So we get it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. On paper, you just slope the surface of the laneway away from the ditch. Simple. But not.

The beautifully even, stone-free surface that you’ve spent 20 years bedding in is going to be ruined.

And you are going to be paying handsomely for the ruination, forking out the equivalent of €400 a day for a fella on a digger to slowly rework all your carefully-crafted laneways.

If that was all there was to it, I think the grumbling would gradually dissipate, especially if milk cheques continue to flow with a base-price of 34c per litre.

Now for the real-life bit. We farm in east Meath, which isn’t exactly famed for its hills, hallows and boggy spots. But if you spend long enough looking, you’ll find wet spots on every farm.

The trick to getting a herd of cows in and out of a parlour at something more than a snail’s pace is to have good laneways. That means a stone-free surface. You can only have that with a clean laneway that has no puddles or hollows.

What happens when we divert the water away from the ditch into the wet hollow? We’ll create an even wetter and muckier hollow in no time.

That section of the field becomes a write-off, and the laneway invariably ends up suffering too.

Try to channel water that might run down the slope of the lane before it reaches the hollow? Yes, that can be done, but you’ll need gulleys and speed bumps to do this, and they end up turning into dirt traps of their own right that become maintenance nightmares.

So we’re taking the slightly drastic action of rerouting laneways altogether out into different parts of the fields that will avoid all the hollows.

It will result in poxy narrow strips of paddocks along ditches where the original laneways once were, but the logic is that we can utilise these as nursery paddocks for the calves.

Moving rather than re-shaping will be even more expensive in the short term, but the hope is that it is a better long-term fix.

It’s just one example of a number of tasks I see coming down the tracks at dairying in particular over the coming years. But if this is what it takes to stay in business, so be it.

There will be lots of misgivings about the costs involved.

In horticulture, there has also been a lot of cribbing in recent years about the compliance costs associated with quality assurance schemes like Global Gap.

But for those farmers who can make sense out of it, over time they also find that these hurdles double up as very effective barriers to entry for new entrants who might like a slice of the action.

If Irish farmers can position themselves as best in class, then they effectively set the standard that all international competitors have to meet.