Is it going to become impossible to farm in the West of Ireland as a result of climate change ?

Change or die. What do they farm in wet Asian countries?

Does farming work anywhere .... What we produce needs supports and what we eat we import.

All farming everywhere needs some support,if you are going to be supporting the big guy up on East Coast, farm in the west will get it as well.

It's the variability which will kill profits.. Countries with extremes make long term plans for extremes... If you have changeable patterns , it's hard to predict when to plant or when to plan lambing dates, and it also makes for a very tough operation...

They also put fertilizer out at levels we can't even imagine.

Paddy fields 😂

There is still a massive amount of land hording by older country folk. Anything that comes up is snapped up by people who don't even farm. Its a very Irish thing.

Is there no enough dairy around to create demand for even marginal land.. Where I am in bog country in the midlands, everywhere is quite low lying and wet, yet everything is getting thendart of the 360 ( track and bottle) and mole plough . Grazing demand from the new dairy demand has eliminate even the snipes grazing

Id question the return on them on the same basis the poster above mentioned

You simply wont get paid if they dont have the kgs, the retailers and processors have the producers by the short and curlies

The producer is the easiest to cut to the bone so they can have loss leaders/sell produce at below cost of production, never mind with a built in margin...the producer is the only one that doesnt have the power to enforce a margin so theyll need to have more units to try get a margin when prices go down or if numbers capped then go begging for more insufficient support just to keep their heads above water

(Not to mention more units even with lower inputs increases labour and other costs although it does spread the risk)

The system as it stands does not incentivize what is being pushed and theres no one can change the big players in the system over to paying a premium for quality rather than quantity etc......

Imo quality product is being sold at wholesale/standard prices ..... the whole thing would have collapsed were it not for subsidies (which are woefully inadequate) and thats where farmers find themselves....consumers now have decades upon decades of way too cheap food being produced while the small to medium producer has been squeezed

Imo unless that changes smaller cows wont matter a shite...unless they are breeds where a premium is paid for superior quality milk/cheese/meat etc

A good Shorthorn cow could always rear a decent (Continental) calf on heavy ground. I always hear a smaller cow costs less. Vet, contractor, insurance, etc all cost the same no matter the cow size. As for smaller cows eating less, on farms I frequent the smaller cow eats as much if not more

The worry is that climate heating up will leave Ireland a colder place if/when ocean currents change due to polar ice-melting

Yes it was 1986. There was another one in the 90's as well, maybe 94?, double chop silage cut in August and the fields ploughed.

96 summer was unreal, in the bog turning turf at 6 in the morning because the heat during the day was brutal.

I remember looking at a picture of a weather program from ten years apart. In the 2000's 26 degrees temperature was graphically shown in yellow as warm. Today it is shown as red and extreme temperature.

Ya mental stuff re the way they are portraying the temperature graphs alright .Ya there was some **** **** summers in the 90s and right heaps of scrap doing the work as well I still remember when the first 110 90 9landed to a local contractor it was thought of as complete luxury 😂

Water buffalo. They make a nice steak

As an adopted kerryman, I just know I've been feeding my bees since the start of July last year.

The **** had a clause that if you rented the land at market rate from your parents you couldnt get entitlements on land when you took over

I also heard of cute hoors locally in the know that knew about the referece years and had boosted their numbers too around that time

Youd be sick of the small print with their pricking schemes too

1985 was the year many farms in the west of Ireland had a disastrous hay summer. There was still a lot of lads depending on hay for their entire winter feed at that time. Making the transition to silage was a big issue and a big cost back then. The spring of 1986 was a disaster very similar to what we are having now cattle were actually starving and dieing and the army was employed in fodder transportation. This was followed by a typical crap Irish summer. Interest rates were savage and rising every month. The government were trying to push a land tax as well. And beef prices were on the floor. And intervention buying for cereals finished at this time too. And the Sugar company were starting to downsize too. Tuam closed that year. It was the worst most depressing period in farming in this country worse than 2013 worse than now. It finished many lads farming careers.

and the majority of the country isn’t farmed…..

There is a trend in that data but presenting it without the analysis hides this fact, but I am sure that was your intention.