Kildare dairy farmer Brian Rushe has said that farming has just been a constant struggle since last July.

“Feed costs have gone up, while production has gone down,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal this week.

With no fertiliser out, cows in and pressure building with slurry storage space, he said “it would make you look at farming and think how you can build resilience”.

To have any hope of good-quality early silage, the former IFA deputy president said that “fertiliser needs to be out soon to maximise yield and quality”.

Tillage

Rory Doyle, a tillage farmer from Laois, has 80% of his winter crops sown in “mediocre conditions”.

He said that yield will be affected by the poor weather.

“We have had two bad years. With new regulations and land prices, we are losing land and production.

“We need help from the Government.

“It’s getting harder every year between poor weather and poor prices. We can’t go through this again.”

Stress

“I’ve never seen land so wet. I’ve never been so stressed.” These were the words of Stuart Fitzgerald, a Wicklow-based tillage farmer.

He has two-thirds of his winter crops sown, with spring beans planted in poor conditions.

He said that “spring barley will be late planted and it will be hard to get the protein low enough for malting barley”, adding that “wet land mightn’t get planted at all”.

He said that “the longer the wet weather goes on, the more the yield will drop”.

Concluding, he said that “it would be great if the Government would pay to leave land fallow.”