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So it wasn’t my imagination that we had a lot of rain this autumn – so much that for the first time, we failed to get our planned winter crops sown.
I am indebted to Met Éireann for supplying me with the figures for the autumn of 2019, back to 1960 – itself an extraordinarily wet autumn, though well before I was farming.
For September, October and November, the autumn we have just come through has been the wettest since 2002, though in that year September was almost totally dry.
The only comparable years have been 2000, 1982 and 1965, with 1960 having been by far the highest autumn rainfall.
The difference in my case may well be the statutory withdrawal of seed dressings and anti-yellow dwarf barley treatments
The question is, from a climate point of view, whether this is a truly exceptional event, simply reflecting normal climate variability or is it the start of a climate change trend?
From the figures, it could not be described as the start of a trend. The difference in my case may well be the statutory withdrawal of seed dressings and anti-yellow dwarf barley treatments that make September sowing dangerous.
Very few tillage farmers took advantage of the glorious weather during this year’s Ploughing to get in their winter barley and, as the weather and ground conditions deteriorated, the backlog kept on building, waiting for the improvement that never came.
On the cattle side, we now have a few pens of steers housed for well over a fortnight
From September to 25 November 2019, there was 313.9mm of rain compared with 211mm in 2018 – as measured at my nearest Met Éireann weather station.
On the cattle side, we now have a few pens of steers housed for well over a fortnight. They are solely on a ration of good silage and hay. The Holstein cross animals are consuming about 2.5% of the body weight in dry matter – far ahead of the standard textbook figure of 1.8%.
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