For some farmers in parts of the west, it has been a 46-week winter, Roscommon IFA county chair John Hanley has said.

Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal this week, he said: “Since the beginning of August, rainfall has been unreal. It would remind you of 1985 and 1986.

“We’re facing severe consequences. Some farmers let out cows on 1 June and they were back in again in August.

“It’s been a 46-week winter for some. Farmers are at breaking point, between calendar farming and slurry regulations.”

Speaking on Countrywide on RTÉ on Saturday morning, Neville Myles, a sheep and suckler farmer from Ballyshannon in Co Donegal, said that it has been raining in the region since the last week of July.

“I had 20 acres that was ready for cutting in the last week of July and we just left it, [saying] ‘Ah, the weather is going to get good next week’.

“One week went from the next and then August disappeared and we said: ‘We’re bound to get a spell.’

“We always get a spell when the kids go back to school or maybe the week of the Ploughing, but it didn’t come this year. We had 27 wet days in September.

“I spoke to four contractors last week and there’s about 500 acres of silage to be cut in this area alone.”

If you take 10 bales an acre that’s 5,000 bales and that’s a lot of fodder in a small area.

When asked what preparation advice he’d give to farmers, Myles said that the only thing that’s standing to farmers at the moment is that there is a reasonably good trade for stock in the marts.

“My advice to farmers is to sell whatever stock they can or if they’ve cows to cull or whatever the case is – keep as little stock in over the winter.

“We’re banjaxed if we get a late spring – that’s the bottom line. Up around this part of the world we’re talking about late March or early April to get them out.

“I know guys around this part of the world where it was May this year when they got stock out on marginal land and they had them back in in August again.

“Keeping a suckler cow in a shed for that length of time is not profitable, it’s not viable.”

Leitrim

Meanwhile, in Leitrim, farmer and weather recorder Des McHugh said that since June, Leitrim has had 614ml of rain.

“There are two particular months that had much higher rainfall amounts compared to the same time in 2016 – August and October.

“We had 148ml in August this year, up half on last year, and October so far is 3.5 times the amount [we received last year].”

He said that in October of last year, 37.8ml of rain was recorded and for October so far, 136ml has been recorded, with a number of days of recording left.

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