Published: Thursday, 18th March, 2010 12:00pm

Farms brown in the mouth

by Brian O'Loughlin

Jim O'Rourke examines grass growing on his farm, and finds it wanting - more brown than the lush green his dairy cows need for optimum milk production.
Pic by==: 97

Brunt brown is not the natural colour for this part of the world, but it's the one that's dominated the Cavan countryside since the severe cold eased a few weeks ago. So what's going on?

Where is spring 2010, the daffodils and the lush green fields we're used to come St. Patrick's Day?

Dairy farmer Jim O'Rourke, the new chairman of Cavan IFA, confirmed that spring is late this year, by a month or more, by his reckoning: "Ground conditions are good now, everything's good, but there's nothing [growing].

"Today we have nothing, we would generally put on an application here in the middle of February, or maybe even prior to that, for an early grazing, but we've done nothing yet."

As it happens, Jim and the two lads who work for him were making preparations for limited fertilizing last Friday morning when the Celt was out talking to him on his farm at Tullyco, Cootehill (near Laragh).

He's not worrying too much yet, and he may be right as the weather improved over the weekend, but the late spring was starting to have some effect on farming.

"If it doesn't change and change favourably there's going to be increased feed costs, obviously, for everybody, because there's nothing on the ground, there's no grass there.

"If it comes favourably for us there's not that much loss yet but I know milk production is down as a result… I'm not saying it's critical but it's having an impact… the country is probably eight or nine per cent under quota.

"The county's producing less milk now than it was when quotas were introduced in '83 or '84. It's a combination of the weather and the [low] prices, but it's having a major impact."

Jim says older farmers confirm this is the worst spring in living memory. "I suppose it's what'll happen from today... it's the critical period. But you're dealing with nature - you could have grass there and the ground would be too wet [for cows] to eat it."

Jim advises that having a bank of feed is a "great insurance policy because you never know, you could run into a problem next July, a wet period. It's not just that we get to April 1 and we're flying… it seems to be more frequent now that you'll run into a problem in what's supposed to be the summer period, and if you can have three weeks or a month's feed left over from the previous spring, it's an insurance policy.

"The weather seems to be getting more difficult, it seems to be getting harder to manage the farm around the weather patterns."

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