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, […]
Farming with Tommy Moyles
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 […]
It’s been a disheartening backend! I thought we might get a run of settled dry weather in September given how wet things were in July and August but it wasn’t to be with Storm Agnes adding yet more wind and rain to deal with. Dock leaves in the field closest […]
I think it’s fair to say this summer has been a far cry from the sunshine and record commodity prices of summer 2022. Rain has made for an incredibly difficult harvest for tillage farmers. The washout summer, a contraction in milk price in excess of 30 per cent and continuing uncertainty […]
It has been pouring down while I write this but the past month has been unusual, not so much because it’s been dry, but because it was so dry so early. The last few summers have had dry spells, so I’ve become accustomed to dealing with that but they’ve usually […]