Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
Ireland potato farmers unable to complete planting
Irish potato farmers have reported a delay in harvest and said that the UK might have to prepare for shortages of the produce. The shortfall is due to extreme wet weather during their planting season.
According to the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), farmers usually have planted about 70% of their crop by March. In mid-April the association said: “Even in the best-case scenario it will not be possible to plant potato seed for at least 10 days, even if it were to dry up tomorrow.”
For these reasons the IFA said that there would be potato shortages in November as this is when the first crop should have been harvested.
February and March (spring in Ireland) is when most of the planting takes place, but with the ground being consistently wet, only a small percentage of farmers were able to continue with planting, said the IFA.
The Irish Meteorological Service said in a statement that the wet weather will continue across the country with five times higher than normal rainfall. The service said that April was possibly the wettest month in the country.
As a result, the IFA said, soil conditions were also deteriorating and many of the farms were waterlogged.
“This year’s difficulty follows on from a poor harvest last year caused by the wet autumn, which made it difficult for machinery to access potato drills. Planting of this year’s crop has been delayed across northern Europe because of the bad weather,” said the union.
The BBC spoke to farmers in the Country Down area who said the spring planting season was a “write-off”. Farmers told the news agency that the ground was too wet for machinery to work and they were predicting more than a six-month delay in planting.