Climate Bolloxolgy.

Your obviously heavily involved God help us.

If you think there is no food scarcity coming here I encourage you to open your eyes. We import nearly everything. There are food riots on many parts of the world and it will be progressively worse coming end of this year and the next.

The Board is elected by the Council.

More info. here https://www.antaisce.org/governance

The food we import is cheaper to produce elsewhere...Its very simple

Ireland has not got an ideal climate for producing wheat. More sunshine needed. East of England, France, northern Italy etc. much better.

Actually we have an ideal climate for producing wheat, we have the highest average yields in Europe, or problem is producing milling wheat for using for human food, a few bad days at harvest ruins the hagberg falling number.

Feed wheat does really well here, as long as we have working fungicides.

Go to the table tab and sort by highest first

I doubt that there’s ever been a wheat breeding facility in Ireland. There’s a multiplication industry that trial and multiply wheats from Denmark, Germany, France and the UK. Funny that the investment was never made, especially in wheats which is a notorious bad traveler…a variety that grows well in one parish can be a disaster in another parish. Now Irish growers are having to deal with varieties that are suitable to completely different climate and growing conditions…and yet they can achieve yields that are some of the best in the world.

The importance of the tillage sector in Ireland is summed up perfectly by the article below…it makes for better ‘sustainability’ for other sectors. The tillage sector has suffered decades of neglect by the Government and the ‘Independent’ research authority.

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/imports-of-big-three-grains-decrease-in-2021-680606

I think it was UCD had a heritage wheat and barley field program on an organic farm in Wexford.

I was at an open day there pre Covid. Now they were small plots. But there was a large variety of strains.

Some of the seed companies here, their reps were having a peek on the day. Very interesting looking at the varieties. Most totally different looking to modern treated varieties.

Edit: The greatest threat to the Irish tillage farmer came from the seed companies and merchants here and patents and licensing and taking the power and control away from the farmer in growing and selling their seed. On the day it was discussed that previously a field could have 40 varieties of corn. All home saved and used year after year. Good luck doing that nowadays.

I'm almost 40 years growing cereals in Kildare, some of my neighbours would be at it longer than that and I've no recollection of there ever being Irish bred cereal varieties, any crop breeding I know of here was potatoes and ryegrass.

A couple of years ago as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of ITLUS I was involved in having some demo plots of old varieties sown on the host farm in Carlow, it was surprising how much old genetic stock is available, it took a bit of organisation to get hold of the small quantities we needed so I don't think it fair to say that everything from years ago is gone, but how much is available I'm not sure, of course you'd need very little for a breeding programme.

When I was in ag college (Warrenstown 1984) septoria nodorum was the big worry as a wheat disease, it didn't take long till that changed and septoria tritici became the prevalant disease, we had loads fo chemistry to control it back then and seemingly every few years something new even better came along, it's no wonder that the crop breeders didn't pay too much attention to it. That's changed now new varieties like Strig and Thorp showed much higher resistance than their competitiors, but that resistance seemed to carry a yield penalty so they never took off, even here.

Now Yellow Rust seems to be developing as a big problem, something we saw rarely up till about 5 years ago, and even varieties with good resistance can fail quite quickly. You never know where the next issue is coming from...

An interesting article for this thread

40 years ago had already seen most of the loss of native grain breeds - you would have to go back 70 years plus to get any idea of the variety of native strains in terms of oats etc. I remember older family members mentioning the difference in strains in terms of stem length etc. with shorter varieties grown in parts of the country where wind and rain was more of an issue. Alot of younger folk would be surprised to know how small tillage plots were standard on most farms in places like North Mayo and West Donegal up till the 60's or so. Something interesting I learn't recently was the surprising extent of the tillage sector in Iceland with their own climate adapted Barley etc. strains

Whether you have a diesel car or not, a fuel heater or something... read this :

This is a very good analysis demonstrating that our politicians (and the Greens) are giving us a show:

DIESEL paranoia is only for cars!

Heavyweights, Buses, Ships are excluded!

Just to put the degree of paranoia among the most virulent DIESEL haters, it is necessary to reveal the data from the maritime industry that has shown that considering the size of engines and the quality of fuel used, the 15 plus large cargo ships in the world pollute as much as the world's 760 million cars on the planet.

You know, those containers that feed us products we manufacture in our off-located factories, today burn 10,000 tons of fuel each round trip between Asia and Europe.

These unfortunate 15 ships are part of a fleet of 3,500, to add the 17,500 tankers that make up the 100,000 ships that sail the seas. (view taken on January 10, 2022 at 6pm)

In order not to leave the maritime domain, let's remember that the French pleasure fleet is about 500,000 units, including 5,000 yachts of more than 60 meters, and that the average of these burn about 900 liters of fuel in just one hour, alo rs only 24% of households French people who heat themselves with fuel are struggling to fill their tank for the winter.

To continue on the path of paranoid schizophrenia, let's take into account the entire fishing flotilla and the 4.7 million heavy weights in transit through France.

The thousands of airplanes moving through the sky and whose consumption per passenger and per kilometer traveled is 3 times more harmful to the climate than the automobile. (view taken on January 10, 2022 at 6pm)

To complete this little fable, let's not forget the essential farming area where the average energy consumption is 101 liters of fuel per hectare.

But no panic, the government will definitely save the planet by sticking a new TAX on DIESEL vehicles only... and weaken our automobile industry a little further, which will increase unemployment in the process...

As you well know, by paying a TAX on petrol, it will not pollute anymore... unless you think you're really stupid .

This also proves that "newspapers" are bought by power to brainwash us.

Passing it on is free !!!

No, we grew only Winter Wheat back then, we never had much success with spring wheat, any spring crops were barley, we had an intake for Williams Waller locally so could usually get a malting barley contract, later we moved mainly to winter barley for feed. Now I have much more of a mixture on the farm, this year we have Winter Wheat, Winter barley for malting, Spring barley for malting, hybrid winter rye for feed and forage maize for silage.

The earliest varieties I can remember here are Norman WW and Goldspear and Midas spring barleys

"Energy prices through the roof... ...Not one brown penny off the electricity bill"