Liam was struggling to make a decent living out of his 300ac farm. This wasn’t any reflection on Liam’s ability to farm; it was more about the difficulties of staying viable when rental land around you is making close to €300 per acre.

Rampant inflation is not going to be confined to house, steel and timber prices. Costs at farm level are going bananas, and land rent is one of the chief culprits.

The most vulnerable cohort are the mid-size farmers. These are the guys relying on a full-time living from their farms, so they must go toe to toe with their neighbours to secure the land that their livelihood depends on.

However, the sad reality is that 150-300 acres of cereals or drystock is often not at a large enough scale to compete on global markets.

So rather than cursing the darkness, Liam lit a candle. He is trying to do what every rural development expert will tell you: add value to the product you are already producing.

After trying a number of exotic alternatives such as hemp, Liam concluded that he was better concentrating on a crop that he already had on the farm rather than reinventing the wheel.

Is there a cereal that grows more freely in Ireland than the oat? Liam felt that with consumers queuing up for alternatives to cow’s milk, why shouldn’t he be one of the suppliers in the form of an oat drink?

He was very particular about that last word. While oat milk might trip off the tongue of most, Liam was very careful not to poke that bear.

Farmers, especially of the dairying variety, are pretty touchy about the hordes of ‘milk’ products that now vie for the consumer’s euro alongside the old staple from the cow.

The notion that a squashed soya bean can produce something on a par with traditional milk is in some ways downright offensive to said cow.

After all, she consumes a plant, puts it through an extraordinary digestion process, before metabolising a wonderfully nutritious liquid that comes straight from her glands.

At the same time, farmers need to get over themselves. Language is constantly evolving, so being a ‘gay chap’ in 1951 is not necessarily the same ‘gay chap’ in 2021, and a burger will never always be beef.

But I was still surprised me at the consumer reaction when I accompanied Liam on a store tasting session in the heart of Dublin city.

Male or female, young or old, Irish or foreign, there was a constant stream of shoppers who were genuinely interested in an alternative to cow’s milk.

Some were committed vegans, others were image-conscious teenage boys, and some were moms and dads on the look-out for ways to reduce their dairy intake.

Health and the environment were the two big factors, but some felt it was an ethical choice, and more were just curious about something they had only vaguely heard about before.

The shop itself was a relatively small supermarket but the manager said they were shifting pallets of the product every week, and that Liam’s drink was the first Irish version they had stocked.

It’s called Oat in the City, a play on the TV hit-show that wasn’t lost on Liam’s neighbours.

“Tis far from Sex in the City you’ll ever be, Lynam,” one of them teased shortly after the product was launched.

That might well be the case, but I’d say the Offaly farmer couldn’t give a fiddlers if the branding sticks in people’s heads just like that.

Of course, not every tillage farmer is going to be able to start pumping all their cereals into drinks. But look at how important the porridge oat business has become for tillage farmers across the country. They now rely on it to add a premium to their output.

Oat drinks could well end up reinforcing that demand a little more, and that might well be all that’s needed.

Darragh McCullough runs a mixed farm enterprise in Meath, elmgrovefarm.ie