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Breaking stories
Weather a temporary setback
By Stephen Cadogan
It could shape up to be another reduced global harvest, bringing increased winter feeding bills for Irish livestock
Ireland’s warm and wet climate is part of our advantage, enabling us to raise milk production when EU milk quotas are lifted in 2015.So, damaging though it is, the weather this “summer” is only a temporary setback.
The farmer’s lot is even more challenging than usual, with much of the silage crop still to be harvested, some cattle re-housed, increased feeding costs, and damage to pastures. Nevertheless, farmers can count their blessings.
Even in New Zealand, which shares Ireland’s productive climate for grass-based farming, a wintry blast recently killed more than 200 cattle, mostly dairy cows, on the west coast.
Such setbacks in countries with normally temperate climates highlight how sensitive to climate, farming (and therefore, food production) is.
Perhaps Irish farmers should be equally worried by what the weather is doing to the US maize crop, reckoned to be the worst in 20 years, due to drought.
The US soybean crop is also rated the worst since 1990.
Meanwhile, early harvest (brought forward to prevent yield loss due to early shedding of dried out kernels) of winter grains in the former Soviet Union has brought grain yields of a miserly 1 to 1.3 tonnes per hectare in large drought-hit eastern areas, and only as high as 3.4 tonnes in less badly-affected southern areas.
In Ukraine, initial harvesting had also resulted in low yields of about two tonnes per hectare, with quality also disappointing, with low specific weights and diseased and insect damaged grains.
In Australia, forecasters continue to predict an El Nino weather pattern later this year which would prevent the optimistic scenario of agricultural surpluses.
Canada has joined the list of countries to suffer weather setbacks to crops, as up to four inches of rain per week prevented crop care and reseeding of lost crops.
It could shape up to be another reduced global harvest, bringing increased winter feeding bills for Irish livestock which will hit even harder than the summer grass and silage setback.
But even higher beef prices than expected is a possible bad weather bonus to take Irish farmers’ minds off this cold and wet summer.
That prospect is slowly taking shape in the US, the largest single beef market in the world for imports and consumption. Recently, feedlots have taken in fast rising numbers of cattle from drought-hit ranches.
US beef cattle numbers are at a near 60-year low, partly due to severe multi-annual droughts in Texas.
Now, states like Kansas are also suffering from drought, with ranchers having to send cattle earlier than usual to feedlots.
The resulting increased supply of fattened cattle and beef about six months from now will only temporarily delay a long-expected US beef supply crisis, when cattle and beef prices will jump into uncharted territory — which could lift global beef prices another notch, and help Irish cattle farmers get over this summer’s difficulties.
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