Irish farmers are used to the vagaries of the Irish weather. It is a perennial issue but rarely has it had such a catastrophic impact as it is having now on Irish farming.
After one of the warmest and driest Junes on record, it started raining in July and has barely stopped since. The knock-on effects have been huge. Beef and dairy farmers have had to keep their cattle in longer because of the soggy ground so there is a fodder shortage and the grass is not growing the way it should be, but tillage farmers have it worse.
The McCormacks have been involved in tillage in Co Meath since the 1960s when Eddie McCormack arrived from Co Mayo and started with 23 acres. Their holding has now expanded to 280 hectares (600 acres) of some of the most fertile land in the country.
McCormack Family Farms outside Dunsany grow lettuce, rocket, spinach and herbs, and count some of the biggest supermarket chains in the country among their customers.
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St Patrick’s Day marks the start of the sowing season, but there is very little seed in the ground and the propagators who grow the infant plants to sell to people like himself are “white with fear”, says Eddie McCormack’s son Stephen who now runs the business.
Millions of plants will be arriving at the gates of horticulture growers next week. “If they are not going to be sown they are going to be dumped,” he says.
He says he has 100 people arriving from Bulgaria on April 15th to pick the first crop of greens “and we still haven’t a seed sown”.
Rainfall last year was 50 per cent higher than normal locally, and this year has been if anything worse. The problem is that the persistent rain has left the ground so saturated that even if dry weather comes it will take two weeks to dry out. “There’s no point sowing into muck. You won’t have a crop,” he said.
“Getting late into sowing your crops can happens, but the soil is so saturated. To dry it you have to plough it. At this moment of time we have mini-diggers going into fields that are waterlogged trying to release the water off the headlands. That water is not going to disappear overnight. It is going to take days of dry weather to disappear.”
That will eat into the time where Irish produce takes over in the shops from produce grown in warmer, sunnier European countries like Spain and Italy which get too hot and dry during the summer to grow greens. “It could be the beginning of June before we have our first harvest,” he predicts.
Teagasc’s head of crops knowledge department Michael Hennessy, who has been in the agriculture industry for 30 years, said tillage farmers have been experiencing problems since last September when harvests were late because of the wet fields.
“This is as bad as I have ever seen it. From the point of view of seed or seed barley in particular and the compounding situation of less than half the winter crops planted and no spring crops until the end of March, I have never seen it this bad. There was always a break sometime, but everything is compounded together.”
Beans, winter wheat and oats have an ideal planting date which has passed and the window is closing for a viable crop. At this stage 70 to 80 per cent of all tillage crops would normally be planted, but not this year, says Hennessy. “As far as spring crops are concerned, we have almost nothing done and that’s not an exaggeration.”
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