JJ's work on winter milk, as published in 1932, was a techno-economic critique of the whole underlying basis of Irish agriculture, which by insisting on allowing milk production to 'follow the grass' has condemned Irish farmers to bulk commodity production and acted as a barrier to value-added(1).

There is also a techno-economic aspect in JJ's concept of combining market gardening with cattle production. The modern 'organic farmers and growers' movement, of which JJ should be regarded as a pioneer, is beginning to take this up(2).

I can identify some pilot techno-economic analysis with which I was associated in the 1950s, when I was in my 'basic science research' phase in the DIAS, and when JJ had retired from the TCD political front-line to develop his market-gardening enterprise at Vicarstown in Laois. For JJ the key concept was the linking of small-scale livestock production with market gardening. JJ brought in the present writer via the analysis of the anaerobic digestion process for farm-yard manure, generating methane, and making the manure more easily handled in a market gardening context. I looked into this, with the aid of Padraig O Hailpin, a consulting engineer. I published a couple of articles in the Irish Times, in or around 1958, and there was some correspondence, but we concluded that on the scale JJ had in mind it was not feasible. The process has however been widely used in China and is beginning to be useful in Africa(3).

In the 1960s there was a sequence of episodes which illustrated the present writer's transition from being a 'pure scientist', through being an 'industrial applied-scientist', towards techno-economic analysis, in which mode he tended to operate during the 1970s.

Some of the most innovative techno-economic work was done with Aer Lingus in the 1960s, where we predicted the performance of the IBM real-time reservations system, in the necessarily stochastic commercial environment, and explained why with American Airlines it had saturated at about a third of its planned capacity. This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time a queue-theoretic approach was used for analysing the performance of a real-time system in a stochastic environment. This has since become the norm(4).

When with Professor FG Foster's Statistics and Operations Research MSc programme in TCD in the early 1970s I did an updated re-run of my father's 1932 winter milk analysis, in the form of a computer-based model for Bord Bainne. There were a number of other agricultural-oriented computer-modelling exercises done in the 1970s, on milk collection logistics, flax production etc(5).

The present writer's pioneering interest in techno-economic analysis declined in the 1980s and 1990s, as with the development of easy access to computing it became routine. The emphasis moved over to the socio-technical and political domains, and to issues related to science and society. Some of the socio-technical issues had a strong techno-economic dimension, especially those arising as a result of the energy crisis. I participated in the 1982 UN conference on renewable energy in Nairobi, and had a hand in trying to develop some follow-through. I had occasion to look into the Crumlin lignite deposits and how they might be utilised. I campaigned for the setting up of a focused national renewable energy centre, though unsuccessfully; the effort remains sporadic and scattered(6).

In the 1990s I found myself again interested in techno-economic analysis, though in marginal time, and on campaigning issues like public transport in Dublin. I submitted a paper to the Irish Planning Institute in which I made the case for a mesh route-map as an alternative preferable to the current centralist system, given the way Dublin has developed, with the emergence of a distributed set of distinct 'urban villages'(7).

Notes and References

2. See JJ's 1942 Capitalisation of Irish Agriculture (JSSISI xvi, 44, 1941-2) and his 1947 An Economic Basis for Irish Rural Civilisation (JSSISI xviii, 1, 1947-8), as outlined in the the 1940s SSISI module. The foregoing papers were later developed into an important chapter in JJ's subsequent book 'Irish Agriculture in Transition', published in 1951 (Blackwell, Oxford, and Hodges Figgis, Dublin). In this developed form it represents the most coherent version of JJ's vision for how he felt Irish agriculture should develop.

3. See the 1950s techno-economic module in the hypertext. JJ reported on it anecdotally in the 1959 SSISI symposium on the Whitaker White Paper.

4. See the 1960s techno-economic module of the hypertext, where these are outlined in some detail. The micro-economic analysis philosophy which emerged from this period forms the basis of a short paper published in the Aug-Sept 1970 issue of Léargas, the journal of the Institute of Public Administration.

5. See the 1970s techno-economic module. The agricultural-oriented computer-modelling exercises are mostly on record in Julian Mac Airt's book on OR in Ireland (Mercier Press, Cork, 1988). See also my Technology Ireland January 1978 paper Technology and the Economy as Interacting Systems which constitutes an outline of the essentials of the techno-economic modelling philosophy which had evolved over the previous 15 years or so, interfacing with the socio-political domains.

6. I have expanded on these topics in the 1980s techno-economic module of the hypertext.

7. See the 1990s techno-economic module of the hypertext; also the 1991 Irish Planning Institute paper A Future for Dublin?, which was submitted as an 'essay' and won a prize, but was never published.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2002