Skibbereen’s Olympic rowers may have dominated the West Cork gold medal winning headlines of late but a world title also found its way to the region in August writes Tommy Moyles. Clonakilty’s Jer Coakley was one of two Irish ploughmen to win on the world stage in mid-August, on the […]
I can’t recall as challenging a 12 months in farming as the past year, even looking back to the extremes in 2012 with a washout summer and accompanying fodder crisis into May 2013. Fast forward five years and it got more extreme. Beginning with hurricane Ophelia in October 2017, through […]
One step forward, any number of steps back, would be a good description of the farming year to date. Bad weather has been the main driver of the difficulties created at farm level as we experienced rainfall in excess of the Long-Term Average (LTA) annual rainfall for the region in […]
From a farming perspective, I’m not sorry to see the back of 2023. It was a washout and a favourable spring is sorely needed on many farms. It might seem like I’m overdoing the weather thing but the rain did feel relentless. That didn’t help farmer mood, as commodity prices, […]
West Cork hosted an international conference on agroforestry in Bantry in mid-November. The Irish Agroforestry Forum hosted the event titled ‘Farmer-led Climate Adaptation and Mitigation. Why and how trees on farms can help’ and attendees heard that farmers have committed to planting over 400,000 trees under the ACRES tree planting […]
The clocks may have gone back an hour but in a lot of West Cork farmyards it feels like they’ve jumped forward by a month. Not just locally, but across the country, livestock have been housed earlier than usual because of the weather – the ground is saturated. For most […]