On a hectic first day at the Ploughing Championships, it seemed that half the Government was on the rounds. At the Irish Farmers Journal stand alone, we had Micheál Martin, Simon Harris, Martin Heydon, Timmy Dooley and Patrick O’Donovan in and chatting.

Of course CAP was a recurring theme in every political conversation, particularly the scale of its budget. That was to be expected with Ireland holding the presidency of the EU council, and the clock now ticking on our chance to deliver a budgetary framework for CAP before the end of the year.

The Dáil and European Parliament may have only resumed from their summer breaks on Wednesday, but Irish officials and ministers have been busy all summer.

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It feels like a quickening is happening, with stalls being set out. Martin Heydon spoke of “chasing money” to ensure the CAP budget is not cut. With a €100bn shortfall in the budget proposal, he’ll have to chase like Ryan O’Donoghue chased Kerry defenders in the All-Ireland final.

The unexpected moment was when Christophe Hansen spoke with David McCullough on RTÉ Radio on Tuesday morning. The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food is attending the Ploughing on Thursday, and certainly was aware of the listeners he might be meeting there.

Hansen is a member of a Commission that wants to cut the CAP budget from €386bn to €300bn for the next seven-year financial period.

“You can only share the pie that has been served,” he said, claiming the member states are responsible for the overall budgetary cake. He failed to mention that agriculture is actually getting a much smaller slice of a much bigger pie, as the Commission proposal is for an overall budget increase of almost 40%.

He did reference that €93bn is potentially being made available for CAP from the mid-term reserve (€45bn) and the so-called rural spending target (€48bn).

The magic “money down the back of the couch” that is the unused funds allocation could also help to fill the CAP shortfall, he said.

“I would be happy if we could get €500bn for CAP,” he added, passing this particularly greasy ball to the member state finance ministers.

Hansen also threw some shade on calendar farming.

“The vegetation season has changed, sometimes the plant is already growing, but the farmer is not allowed to apply fertiliser,” he said.

I was beginning to think he might run for IFA president next year when he then talked about the need to review how we account for methane emissions from livestock.

The Commissioner will test his ploughing skills on Thursday, and is attending the brown bread making. He needs to plough a new furrow within the Commission, and get a bigger slice of the budgetary bread and butter pudding.