Memories of 2012 and 2017 washouts come flooding back

Herd immunity

Regular readers of this column will know that I try not to conform to all the stereotypes of the moany farmer, long on complaining and looking for grants and short on being progressive and actually trying to operate a 21st century agri-business enterprise.

I know, you are already shaking your head and raising your eyebrows. I know how some of you see us farmers and I hope that you will have learned a little from your weekly instalment of Herd Immunity. We are not the bad guys – although, I’ll be the first to admit, a lot of us don’t help ourselves.

Unfortunately, this week, I have no option but to beat a drum that has been well-pounded by now. All I can say is, bear with me!

I know that at this point, some of our non-farming friends are about to turn to the next page. “Here we go again,” I can hear them groan, “this lad is on about the weather again and yet ANOTHER crisis in agriculture!”

Well, you’re right – but hear me out. What you are about to read is the the cold (and that is the operative word, as you will discover as we go on), hard truth of farming in 2021.

To break it down to ABCs, grass is our number one ingredient. Without grass, we cannot feed our stock. Put it this way: if you went into a hardware store for some cement and the staff told you there was none to be got, surely that would be a crisis for Irish construction.

Well, we are hurtling towards just such a catastrophic situation for farming at present – and if this sounds like hyperbolic language, I can assure you that I do not say it lightly.

Of late, growth has slowed to almost zero. Cold frosty nights and sunny breezy days dried the ground into a hard cake.

Somebody told me yesterday that it was the coldest April in 100 years and I’d well believe it.

Ground that has been grazed is as bare as I have ever witnessed in spring and regrowth is nigh on impossible in these conditions.

The good fall of rain on the last two weekends was needed but a deluge is not and that is what we had in some areas in recent days. While the forecasts for the last few days indicated that things would improve temperature-wise, that’s only part of the puzzle. There was too much of the wet stuff and that is not conducive to prime growing conditions either.

It has been something of a perfect storm. The equation is simple: bare ground plus plenty of rain equals wet conditions underfoot.

Amazing as this sounds as we move into the second week in May, I can honestly see cattle being housed in numbers in the coming days if the rain proves to be persistent.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and a number of dairy farmers around Deere Manor have some of their silage ground eaten.

That’s a stop-gap measure and really is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul – or feed him, maybe - but hungry cows need grass.

Like everything else in our industry, nothing happens in a vacuum. If something happens now, as sure as night follows day, there will be a knock-on effect at some point. That goes for cattle prices, new regulations, you name it.

I sometimes wonder how farmers do it; so much is out of our hands. As flies to wanton boys, to paraphrase old Willie Shakespeare, are we to the Gods…

What will all this cold, wet weather and poor growth mean down the line? Well, one thing is for certain, we are going to need one hell of a summer growing season or we face the possibility off a fodder shortage next winter.

Now Mother Nature can often take away with one hand and give with the other so we could look back on this blip later in the year and see it just as it is, a momentary glitch which is frustrating but will have a limited meaningful long-term adverse effect, or we could, whisper it, be in for another 2012 or 2017.

You only have to mention those two God-forsaken years to any farmer and their reaction – a shudder, a shake, maybe even a tear for the more emotive types among us – will tell you all you need to know.

If 2012 and into 2013 was an annus horibilis, 2017 in its own way was arguably worse because it looked promising for a time and then, bang, it all went south in a big way.

2012 was a complete washout once May was over. Back then, it rained incessantly and the rain continued, more or less, all the way till May 2013. Needless to say, the net result of this prolonged wet season was that it caused a huge fodder crisis.

I always remember I housed stock in June of that year, buying fodder at significant expense, all the while hoping that the ground would dry. It was a nightmare.

2017 was different; it had been very good up until the beginning of July. Then monsoon season ensued and it seemed to keep raining until the spring of 2018. Again, it was an unmitigated disaster.

I’m not saying that we are in for the same again but all we can do is hope and pray that this year doesn’t turn into one of them because I certainly don’t fancy having to house stock and buy expensive fodder this June. Fingers crossed.