Weather woes no longer cause real farming hardship

THE other day I was having a drink with a neighbour of mine who is a part-time farmer.

He was grumbling about the weather, as all farmers tend to.

He has several hay meadows and the crop should have been saved in June. It was now August and the grass was rank. The fields, instead of green, were a pale fawn colour from the ripe seed heads. This doesn’t make for good hay.

The weather had improved slightly and he decided to take a chance on saving some sort of a crop. But he is dependent on other people with the machinery to mow, toss and bale the hay. And everyone with that kind of machinery was working flat out.

The days are now considerably shorter than they were in June and there is a huge backlog of hay, silage and haylage to be cut.

I understood his frustration but I also used to know his late father, from whom he inherited the land. His father was a full-time farmer. What was annoying for the son would have been disastrous for the father.

As little as 20 or 25 years ago the local economy round here was incredibly weather-dependent. It was almost exclusively based on farming and saving turf, and both activities require reasonably good summer weather.

Up until quite recently, a couple of wet months in the summer would have meant real hardship. People would not actually have suffered hunger but their diets would have changed and there would have been genuine deprivation. There would also have been fears about the coming winter without enough turf for heating and cooking and inadequate winter fodder for livestock.

It’s also very hard to harvest potatoes in this kind of weather. I know, because I’ve been trying.

Normally when you lift a potato plant the tubers are easy to spot. But if the soil is saturated, digging potatoes is not only an incredibly messy business but because they are coated in mud, it’s very hard to distinguish them from clods of soil.

And when I washed the mud off the last bucket-full, I found tell-tale brown blotches on some of them.

Potato blight thrives in humid conditions. I had sprayed twice with a copper solution but persistent rain had washed the spray off the leaves.

This was very annoying but, again, I tried to imagine what it would have meant to the previous inhabitants of my cottage. It’s quite amazing how country life has changed. The vast majority of my neighbours now have no connection to the land or the bog.

There are one or two very large farms in the area that are still being run as commercial operations. The rest of the land is still being farmed but in a curious, automatic sort of way. It’s as if farming is an addictive habit you can’t shake.

There’s a rural joke about a farmer who won the lottery and was interviewed by his local radio station about how the money would change his life. His answer to the question was: “I’ll just keep on farming till it’s all spent.”

I tried to console my neighbour and he acknowledged that his problems weren’t really that serious. His day job was unaffected by the weather and there would be no significant reduction in his income. But he didn’t seem much happier.

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