When I was growing up, my father would have watched the weather forecast 10 times each day. We dared not make a noise when it was on.

It was only in later life that I realised why he was doing this. In fact, I’m now probably worse than my father ever was as I check the weather on the internet as well as the television.

Here in Fermanagh, we seem to get more than our fair share of rain (1,200mm to 1,500mm/year). The rain over the last week has truly started to take its toll on ground conditions.

I attend a lot of discussion groups and go on a lot of farm walks. Almost always, the story is to turn cattle into covers of 8cm and graze it down to 4cm. I have been grass measuring for four years (with a plate meter) and, until two weeks ago, I was never able to get down to 4cm.

You may recall the lovely dry hard weather we had a couple of weeks ago and it made the management of grass swards so simple. I could get that extra day or day and a half out of the paddocks and the cattle were still content.

What a difference! The cattle are coming out of the paddocks which still have 7cm to 8cm of grass on them and if I were to try and get down to 4cm, it would probably mean that the paddock would be ready for reseeding afterwards. Instead of getting three days in the paddocks we are down to one day, if we are lucky.

Anyone who tries to farm in Fermanagh, or indeed most of the west of NI, can understand the problems that the rain causes. This is why the weather forecast is so important. We must always try and stay one step ahead.

It also means that sometimes we have to work with heavier covers of grass.

Advice

A lot of advice would be to skip out paddocks when they go over 8cm and save them for silage but, in my opinion, this is well off the mark for those of us farming in the west. My thinking on this is that heavy grass covers of up to 12cm are still fine in wet weather. I would rather carry heavy covers in wet weather than put cattle into light covers.

I also understand that other parts of NI have problems in the summer with a lack of rain and this can also make it difficult to manage grass.

There are times (such as in the last week) that I think it would be nice to have these problems instead of our own.

But then I think back to some of the really dry summers and I realise that many of us farmers in the west aren’t actually that good at managing grass in dry weather. We are inclined to let it run to seed head and become very unpalatable, which then requires the topper to be taken out of the shed to bring swards back under control.

We have got used to working in wet conditions and perhaps this is what we do best, even though we like to moan about it.

For me, I will continue to follow my father’s footsteps and watch the weather forecast daily and try to make the right management decisions accordingly.

Hopefully we will soon have some good news on the weather front.