Farmers fear that recent bad weather is threatening the quality of this year's harvest.
Michael Hennessy, a Teagasc tillage specialist, said potato farmers were experiencing difficulties because of the wet conditions which were making the lifting of early potatoes difficult.
"I encountered two main problems in the potato area. One was the difficult harvesting conditions caused by the wet weather and the second is that farmers cannot put machinery in to spray against blight because of the soft ground and the conditions," he said.
He said if the poor weather continued this could have an impact on the yields from maincrop potatoes should they be hit by blight as farmers needed dry, windless weather to spray against the disease.
Prof Jimmy Burke, head of Teagasc's crops research centre in Carlow, said tillage farmers are anxiously watching for a break in the weather as the harvesting date for winter barley in early July approaches.
Speaking at the Oak Park tillage crops open day at the agriculture and food research headquarters yesterday, he said there had been some serious "lodging" or flattening of crops by rain and wind in some parts of the country.
"If the weather does not get worse, we are expecting a decent cereal harvest this year because up until recently the weather was kind enough even though at one stage in May there was a moisture deficit," he said.
Farmers attending the event were complaining about the weather which they said had delayed silage-making. No one in the country, they said, had yet managed to make hay.
Prof Burke said there was a growing confidence in the cereals sector because of the recent upsurge in the demand, up 30 per cent over the past year.
He said increased world demand was driven by the use of cereals for energy and adverse climatic conditions in some of the major producing countries.
Teagasc experts claimed that cereal grains were serious contenders as biomass fuels, especially in small boilers for heating single homes.
Research there found that grains were only slightly inferior to wood pellets although they do have higher ash content with oats, dried to 15 per cent moisture, giving the highest heat value of the common cereals.