Ireland's cereal farmers were told yesterday to "smash and grab" or lose the best grain harvest on record to the bad weather.
Yesterday, tillage expert Dr Jim O'Mahoney told farmers they could not afford to wait for long spells of dry weather to cut their grain. He explained that cereal farmers normally wait until the moisture content in their crops drops to around 20 per cent.
"This year they will have to grab it while they can, even if the moisture content is as high as 24 per cent, cut it and save it, or you will lose it," he said.
"It's being called the smash-and-grab harvest and there is no better explanation for it," said the Teagasc tillage expert.
He said that only 10 per cent of the winter wheat crop, which should already be in the granary, had been harvested.
He said somewhat more of the the winter barley crop had been saved, but all the cereal crops were being endangered by the poor weather.
"This year we have had bumper yields and were facing an early harvest, but now we risk losing it because of the weather," he said. The main problems being caused by the rain, he said, was sprouting in the wheat crops and the shedding of grain in the barley crops.
He said sprouting in the malting barley crop was potentially disastrous as the crop could not be used for making beer if it sprouted because of the warm muggy weather.
"With the winter cereal harvest delayed and the spring sown crops ready for harvesting as well, there are serious pressures on farmers," he said.
The chairman of the Irish Farmers Association's national grain committee, Mr Paddy Harrington, said the grain harvest was at "a very critical stage".
He said many farmers had reported sprouting and shedding in crops, especially in the south of the country where the harvest was ready. "There will be major losses if we cannot get the crops out of the fields soon and that will be a great shame because the yields were so good this year."
He said an increase in the national grain harvest from 1.9 million tonnes last year to 2.2 million tonnes this year, had been expected. Yields of 10/12.4 tonnes per hectare, that is 4 to 5 tonnes per acre, had already been recorded in what was expected to be the best wheat harvest ever.
The highest wheat yields recorded here were in 2000 when returns of 9.9 tonnes per hectare were returned from wheat.
For the last decade, Irish cereal farmers have been returning the highest per hectare yields from cereals in the world.