Farmers left in frantic ‘fight for their future’
THE final days of April are set to be cool and unsettled, Met Éireann has said, but farmers are frantically trying to capitalise on the recent dry conditions.
The adverse weather over the past several months has put farmers on the back foot, and they are now trying to make up for lost time.
Tillage farmers in particular are said to be ‘fighting for their future’, with new figures from the Central Statistics Office showing that main cereal crop production fell by 20% last year.
The Irish Farmers Association said that tillage farmers have faced a ‘perfect storm’ since summer 2023, with falling grain prices, stubbornly high input costs, a loss of rented land and heavy rainfall ever since.
Eddie Doyle, a potato and vegetable farmer from south Kilkenny, said he had started planting around last weekend.
‘We were obviously waiting for land to dry out, but mother nature has come good and we are up and running, albeit slowly.
‘You’d need an army to get everything done as quickly as we’d like to get it done in our heads. Anyway, we’re getting there.’
He said that farmers would do as much as they could in the gaps between showers.
‘The spirits are finally lifting with farmers after the wet weather, and the spirits are lifting for everybody. It was dreadful. It doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer or living in the middle of Dublin city, you need a bit of sunshine on your back.’
Mr Doyle said most farmers were dealing with an average delay of about a month, and that losing 30 days of growing time would have a significant impact on the harvest time.
IFA president Francie Gorman said the CSO figures were further evidence of the pressures on the agriculture sector. In 2023, two million tonnes of wheat, barley and oats were produced, down 500,000 tonnes on 2022. Potato production was down 12%.
Mr Gorman said: ‘It further highlights the urgency of the Tillage Survival Scheme put forward by IFA. We raised this again with Taoiseach Simon Harris last week. No time can be lost in putting together a package that provides some hope.’
The IFA’s proposal is for a €250-per-hectare five-year payment for tillage farmers.
Mr Gorman said: ‘There is no question that our tillage sector is fighting for its future. The Government says it wants to have more tillage production and this will only happen if they step up and support growers. What was announced by the Agriculture Minister is inadequate.’
A spokesman for the IFA said it would be around August before farmers would find out if they had managed to catch up on all the planting time lost to the relentless rain this spring.
He added: ‘I would say the mood is a lot better now than it was a few weeks ago. Farmers got a good week to catch up but the outcome won’t be known until harvest time, when we will see the impact on yields.’
Met Éireann said that today
‘The mood is a lot better now’
will be cool with sunny spells. It will start off mainly dry apart from isolated showers in the east and northwest.
Through the day those showers will become more scattered, feeding in over the country in a light to moderate northeasterly breeze, with highest temperatures of between 9C and 12C, mildest in the west, dropping to as low as -1C at night.