Hello and welcome to our Red Lines with a difference. This is Mark Carruthers and this week we've been given a day pass out of the studio and we've set up camp at the Balmoral Show just outside Lisburn.

Its organisers, the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society, like to boast that it's Northern Ireland's biggest and best loved food and agri event and this year the sun's out to mark the occasion.

We're here to test the temperature among the farming community in particular as it faces all

manner of challenges from bovine TB and the Nutrients Action Program to pending inheritance tax

changes and net zero targets. We'll be hearing from a wide range of guests over the course of the

next hour or thereabouts and let's start with a view from the high ground courtesy of our

agriculture and environment correspondent Louise Cullen. Louise, thanks very much for making time for us.

You've had a busy couple of days. There are plenty of people here enjoying a great day out, no doubt about that. But this is a

political podcast and there are big issues that are going to be discussed at this event over the

next four days. Bird flu is thankfully less of a problem than it has been for quite some time.

So I suppose people will be celebrating that fact. But there are very big challenges for our farmers and our producers

at the moment. Absolutely. I mean, they're trying to leave the worries at the farm gate for a day out

at Balmoral, catching up with friends, chatting about what's worked, what's not, and sharing those

experiences, but sharing those troubles as well is bound to happen. On top of their list has to be

inheritance tax, that impending change that you mentioned.

This has removed the 100% relief that farmers got on death for inheriting a farm, and it's

thrown people here into chaos because Northern Ireland's in a pretty unique position in the UK.

Our land values are so high in some areas twice as high as they are anywhere in England and Wales.

And that land value alone puts, the department says, almost half of all farms in Northern Ireland over that one million pound threshold.

So there's absolute confusion and a lot of stress for farmers.

And of course there's very little agency that our politicians have here to actually deal with that issue.

You were talking to a representative of the Ulster Farmers Union on the radio this morning.

...