Farming It’s hard to spot the silver lining with so much cloud
Comment Fordyce Maxwell
Like a tongue returning to a throbbing tooth there are times when no matter how hard we try our thoughts return to one topic. Got it in one, the weather.
We try to make the best of it. As a neighbour, wearing more protective clothing than an Innuit going fishing with only his glazed post-lambing eyes showing between anorak and woolly hat, said one morning recently: “Thank goodness for global warming.”
That was without mentioning the rain alternating with sleet falling during our brief conversation. Later there was snow. An urge to shout “For goodness sake, this is almost mid April” died away. What would be the point?
We have had what seems like a seven-month winter so far. The forecast for the coming week is for higher temperatures and sunshine, but we have heard that before. Seeing will be believing.
As it is, the comment I heard years ago from an American comic comes frequently to mind: “Some days it just doesn’t seem worth chewing through the leather straps.” Another that has come to mind more often recently is: “Mother said there would be days like this. But she didn’t say there would be so many of them.”
Farmers whose income can be hard-hit by weather, as this winter and so-called spring after a protracted harvest last year, feel that way even more. They have been here before with late, cold, wet springs, but that doesn’t make this one any easier to bear.
There was a time when I made comparisons with previous outrageous bad
0 It’s hard to get away from the topic of the weather weather. Were temperatures lower in 2013, was spring 1982 worse than the spring of 1986, how bad was the so-called summer when it came, when was the heaviest rainfall in March, remember the April blizzard of 1979? Or was it 1980?
And so on until I began to ask myself who cared and did it matter? Knowing what the weather was like at the same time of year 20, 30 or 40 years ago would not put more silage, hay or straw in to a shed now or make this spring’s atrocious lambing conditions any easier.
Many farmers have run short of feeding and bedding, grass isn’t growing, animals have been kept inside too long because conditions outside are unbearable and there are piles of dead lambs and ewes waiting for collection. If one thing adds to the misery of a cold, wet spring day it is a heap of dead animals.
Knowing how wet the soil was one spring a generation ago and the ridiculous hours we worked to catch up when sun and a drying wind finally arrived will not make waiting for the same thing to happen this year any easier.
Fertiliser spreading on waterlogged soil is not advisable even when possible. Wheel ruts once made are there for six months. Nor is drilling grain or trying to plant potatoes or vegetables. Frustration, anger and misery are emotions that tend to make us live in the present rather than muse on the past, although they aren’t quite what the masters of Zen had in mind when they advised devotees to live in the now.
Farmers got a lot of credit in the past few months of bad weather, especially during the heavy snow when many turned out with snow-clearing equipment to keep roads open and provided a lifeline for rural life. That warm glow of public appreciation was welcome.
Whether public goodwill would extend to farmers getting special help in the immediate future to compensate for the bad weather, such as the one suggested last week by NFU Scotland, is another matter. Free collection of dead animals, rather than farmers having to pay for the service, might be a possibility.
But the further suggestion by at least one leading rural charity that farmers should be a special case for assistance might fall on stony ground.
As noted earlier the income of livestock and arable farmers depends more on the weather and government support than most industries, but other sectors – for example construction, fishing, hospitality, rural retail and catering – can and do also suffer. When it comes to such lousy weather we’re all in it together.