It was a listless Friday morning in Athboy. The hot sun was shining from a picture-perfect blue sky and, while people remarked about the beautiful weather, everyone was taking it for granted by this stage.

It has the hallmarks of the great summers of the past like 1984, 1995 and 2006 but farmers are more cautious.

Besides, there are those – mostly dairy farmers – who openly weep for rain to wash the fertiliser in for second-cut silage and spring barley is thirsty.

However, some tillage farmers are worried that the year’s quota of good weather might be all used up before there’s a blade taken to the cornfields.

There is indeed a danger of that, but at the very least the sun will have swelled the grain and it’s been brilliant for the oilseed rape. But rain right now could be ominous for flowering wheat, which is at a critical stage.

The serene small-town peacefulness was shattered by the roar of diesel engines and rattling silage trailers as a contractor’s outfit rolled into town.

The ubiquitous Claas harvester led the posse, the trailer drivers with shirts ripped open to the waist and blipping the throttles between the gears. I had to wait for what felt like five minutes to cross the street until they and the traffic tailback had passed and Athboy slid back to sleepy tranquillity.

The silage contractors have had a ball. Meadows are on the light side, grass is dry and the ground dusty making for an easy season, albeit with expensive fuel. I even saw articulated lorries being used to draw silage in a Roscommon field.

Heavy meadows

Normally in Ireland we have the heaviest meadows in the world as a result of our wetter summers, making this an ideal country to test grass machinery.

Equally not only have we the heaviest meadows but some of the roughest and toughest operators to test machines – men who would bend a crowbar in a bog, no problemo. If grass machinery works well in Ireland, it’ll work in New Zealand or South Korea or anywhere else.

All of which was on my mind after an ITLUS visit to the McHale factory in Ballinrobe the previous day. The McHale name is synonymous with industry-leading and well-built grass machinery which has an enviable reputation for reliability and durability. But the two McHale brothers started from small beginnings selling imported silage block cutters which weren’t up to the job so they built their own.

So the McHale brand was born and today it employs 500 people between here and Hungary and ships out six artic loads of machines every day to 56 countries worldwide. The plant is state of the art, using an overhead rail system to ferry materials around the factory floor and the paint dipping plant is probably the most advanced in Europe.

But McHale is in good company in Mayo. Agri-Spread in Ballyhaunis is also a cutting-edge business manufacturing fertiliser and lime spreaders, almost entirely for export. Major Machinery exports grass equipment around the world and Malone is only down the road.

On reflection, there’s hardly a county on the island of Ireland that hasn’t at least one export-driven farm machinery manufacturer.

For a country that manufactured little more sophisticated than a wood and channel iron Eureka trailer until 30 years ago, that’s some progress.

The only steel-manufactured product before that, which became a household name, was the Belfast-built Titanic. Belfast was then the shipbuilding capital of the world.

But now if you were to mention Ireland in the new world capital for shipbuilding, in the huge Hyundai Heavy Industries yard in South Korea, a welder (and part-time farmer) will shout: “McHale, very good!”

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Farmer writes: half the silage requirements for next winter made