What a washout the last fortnight has been. In a period of 12 days, we experienced rainfall in excess of 30mm four times.

Roads were washed away in the locality, parts of west Cork that received multimillion euro flood defences were flooded, and even the beach down the road was washed out to sea.

The fact that ground conditions were relatively dry up until two weeks ago has been a saving grace.

A combination of smaller group sizes and strong winds drying ground are keeping any damage to a minimum. As a result, grazing conditions are holding up better than expected.

The travails of a livestock farmer at the moment pale in comparison to the challenges faced by grain farmers

Given the prevailing conditions, I felt it was safer to put Cal-Mag buckets with the cows last week. This is earlier than usual, but prevention is better than cure.

An upside from the combination of warm temperatures and moisture has been grass growth. It’s been excellent.

Silage

Usually, I like to have our silage season wrapped up before the end of July, but a few lessons were learned from the late cuts in 2018. The plan at the start of the month was to take a light cut off 8ac this week where the young stock are wintered. With growth driving on, an extra 2ac were added and by the time the mower arrived Sunday, another paddock was added to the mix.

Hopefully, we should be well stocked with silage now. The latest cut yielded a similar result to the first cut back in May. I could have cut another few acres on the home ground, but if the weather continued as it was, I might have ended up feeding bales the week after instead.

The travails of a livestock farmer at the moment pale in comparison to the challenges faced by grain farmers.

Between drought early in the year and now this wind and rain, it’s going to test their resilience yet again.

Golfgate

As bad as the weather has been, the “golfgate” fiasco has been a distraction from it all.

Farmers might have expected a different form of green to cause trouble for the new Government, which finds itself firmly in the rough. Long before events in Clifden came to the fore, there were plenty of cracks visible in the “we’re all in this together” approach to tackling COVID-19.

Farmers will wait and see who our Minister for Agriculture for the month of September will be

The fact that a global pandemic dominates the headlines doesn’t mean Brexit or CAP negotiations have gone away. There’s been enough turmoil in agriculture over the last 18 months or so, and having a monthly Minister for Agriculture over the course of the summer isn’t helping the situation.

Turn the clock back to last autumn and some politicians who were offering support to farmers outside factory gates find themselves in power. Surely, some common sense will prevail and a minister is found to try and tidy up the mess.

Even then, there’s going to be an uncertainty among farm organisations, the heads of whom will be meeting their third new minister in 10 weeks.

In the meantime, farmers will wait and see who our Minister for Agriculture for the month of September will be.

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