So, is the summer of 2026 one of the great summers of our time? Well, frankly I think it’s too early to make that call and I wouldn’t be making any great pronouncements until the wheat harvest is over. That’s only starting now, albeit two weeks early. It could yet turn out to be a pig of a year, so we’ll see.

However, it has been warm enough for long enough already to make comparisons with the great summers of the past 50 years.

The summers of 1976 and 1977 were very hot and I have vivid memories of replacing a fan belt on the New Holland 1540S combine in unbearable heat on a Saturday afternoon in 1977.

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But I remember it for another reason as well. On the following day, cousins of ours were up from Roscommon and all being petrolheads, brother Thomas and I took off with the two boys in their father’s car.

At the end of the Rathcormick straight, there’s a hump in the road and at 80mph the Cortina became airborne and we hit an ash tree four metres up.

I don’t remember the impact, but we all survived and woke up in Navan hospital.

Moving forward to the super summer of 1984, when we hit 4t wheat crops for the first time. This was a useful catalyst for me, as we were in the process of buying the farm on which I now live.

With grain and straw sales of £500/acre, it was easy to justify a land purchase price of £1,460/acre. But interest on borrowed money was a crippling 22%.

Beautiful golden wheat was pouring into the tank and Dad remarked that we wouldn’t know what to do with all the money we’d make

Onto the scorcher that was 1995, and again with huge yields. The memory is poignant for me. Dad was terminally ill and I recall him with great difficulty climbing up the steps of the IH Axial Flow 1660 combine.

Beautiful golden wheat was pouring into the tank and Dad remarked that we wouldn’t know what to do with all the money we’d make.

But we knew all right, and a new Fendt Zylon and Kuhn power harrow arrived pretty quickly afterwards, in addition to other stuff.

Dad died a few weeks after the end of harvest, his earthly toil over.

Which reminds me of another related 1995 story. Four days before Dad died, Mum asked me to bring him on a final drive around the farm.

There was a couple of hot harvests in the early 2000s, but they were not in the same league

On the parched and very bare earth of the Far Lawn field, he remarked that the solid cattle stools looked like sandcastles on a beach. I smiled. Dad never called them stools before (like me, he used the less polite word), but I like to think he was cleaning his act up in preparation to meeting his maker.

There was a couple of hot harvests in the early 2000s, but they were not in the same league and, besides, grain prices were low. And of course, the summer of 2018 was a cracker weather-wise, but the wheat yields were poor. Let’s hope for better this year (I’m not convinced), but it’s refreshing to see grain prices rising somewhat.

This year the oilseed rape was tough harvesting with green stems leading to walker blockages, which are a curse to clear.

But the seed was only 9% moisture and the yield pleasing at a smidgeon over 2t/acre. The price is good too but next year, for rotational reasons we will have a well reduced area, if any at all.

But never mind next year, I hope it stays fine until at least the Moynalty Steam Threshing on 9 August, by which time a lot of the wheat could be wound up. If that happens and yields are reasonable, then 2026 can cement its place as one to remember.