Decent Spring but we need to plan for the bad ones

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One year on and most of us are quite happy to look out at green fields, showing a steady response to the few bags of nitrogen spread over recent weeks.

What a difference a year can make. Just 12 months ago we were in the throes of a wicked March with cold soils and a vicious east wind that put paid to any hopes of any early green shoots appearing.

That legacy of cold soils and stunted growth continued on through April and May, and it wasn’t until we got a real warm week at the beginning of June, that the breakthrough came for the keepers of the land.

The first problem was the cost of fodder and then that turned getting your hands on any decent quality hay or silage, leading to artic loads of bales arriving from the UK and from France.

It really was all hands to the wheel but the likelihood of such a set of circumstances repeating itself again this year was small.

Last year really was the ‘perfect storm’ scenario for everything that could go wrong – the summer before was a wet one with poorish quality silage, the wet conditions continued through the autumn and winter, and just when we needed growth, hey presto, a savage period of cold weather arrived.

According to the latest edition of the Teagasc TResearch magazine, additional feed costs last Spring on Irish farmers came in at €400m with output losses estimated at €65m.

So you wonder, why we all talk so much about weather . . . well there’s one very good reason . . . it can end up taking a lot of ‘lucre’ out of our pockets.

Teagasc, the farm advisory body that undertakes invaluable research into all things agri and food related, recently devoted a full conference to the impact of last year’s weather conditions and now over the coming years they are sponsoring a whole series of Walsh Fellowships to investigate the effect of future climate change and weather volatility on Irish agriculture.

One of the key points of the Teagasc research is that over the coming years, Irish farmers will need to build in, what is termed weather resilience, into their farming plans and production systems.

A key factor in all of this is to put a whole farm feed budget in place that essentially will match grass production with the stocking rate on their farms.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune