As the sun sets on another cereal harvest, for hundreds of farm families it could well be their last. Despite being one of the quickest and easiest harvests ever, 2026 will prove to be one of the hardest.

While the weather was good, yields are back significantly and grain prices are low.

Last February, tillage editor Siobhán Walsh wrote that the breakeven yield required for spring barley at €180/t is 3.13t/acre. OK, the price per tonne is looking like it will be closer to €200/t but the yields are closer to 2.3t/acre on many farms. These breakeven figures don’t include straw sales or subsidies but nor do they include land rent or the opportunity cost of land.

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In tillage, the old cycle of perhaps three good years and two bad years in every five, has disappeared. The last good year was 2022 and the one before that was probably 2008.

If it’s not price it’s weather, and more often than not it’s the two together, with tillage farmers at the coalface of Ireland’s changing climate.

There is also something more fundamental happening in global food production that tillage farmers are missing out on. Since 2020, lamb prices in Ireland and the EU have more or less doubled.

The same is true for cattle and if I was writing this last year, I’d be saying the same for dairy. Milk prices have obviously fallen significantly in the last 12 months but the long-term trend is overwhelmingly positive for dairy.

Each of the above sectors is benefitting from the protein rush, while tillage is left out. This is not just an Irish or an EU issue, it’s happening globally whereby margins from arable farming are declining while margins from livestock farming are increasing.

Traditionally, the cure for low prices was low prices. Farmers reacted to lower prices by planting fewer acres, supply dropped and prices rose. This was particularly true in the US and Eastern Europe, where cropping area was ultra-sensitive to profit margins.

In 2010, the combined quantity of wheat exported from Russia and Ukraine was 27m tonnes. Fast forward to last season and that has increased 2.5 times to 68m tonnes.

I was reading recently where it was said that war dollars are keeping Black Sea exports up. In other words, even though it may not be profitable to grow wheat, the money it brings into the two warring nations means they need to keep growing wheat and keep exporting it.

In the US, production is not incentivised to fund the war effort (at least not yet), but rather production is not disincentivised when margins are low. This is because government supports such as crop insurance and margin protection effectively guarantee farmers a return from cropping, regardless of prices.

US farmers have bipartisan support in congress, even Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act promised $40bn in funding to farming so it is not just a Trump thing.

On top of this, the global output of rice is also increasing, fuelled by improved agronomy and more intensification in places like India and Pakistan. Across all classes of cereals, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that global stocks are at the second highest level ever recorded, down just 1.8% from the record achieved in 2025.

Meanwhile, inflation in input prices, labour costs and soaring machinery replacement costs continue to erode margins at farm level.

There are fundamental challenges facing the tillage sector in Ireland, yet tillage farmers feel they are not being listened to. It’s coming up to the one-year anniversary of the tillage crisis meeting that saw 700 growers pack into a hotel in Kildare.

The IFA will need a bigger venue if they are to hold a similar meeting this autumn.

A funding package of over €60m per year was promised to the sector by the Government parties before the election, but so far that lifeline has failed to materialise. It won’t change global markets, but it might keep the sector afloat until the fundamentals change again.

* Adam Woods is on annual leave this week.