The week of sunshine around the ploughing has drifted into distant memory and you’d swear we have just skipped October and gone straight into November. Southeasterly wind storms tend to be the worst here and the one on the last weekend of September left every east-facing window with a spattering […]
Farming with Tommy Moyles
I hate wishing time away but after 14 months of hoping next week’s weather will be better, it seems that’s just what I’ve done. I’ve written this year off as a grazing season and I’ll just manage it out for the rest of the year. When it comes to stymied grass […]
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 […]