DESPITE THE broken weather, farmers across the country are well ahead with this year's harvest.
The more settled weather of two weeks ago meant that the vast bulk of this year's silage and hay crops were saved before the weather broke early last week.
Even in Co Limerick and parts of north Cork, where towns including Newcastle West, Mallow and Fermoy experienced flooding, farmers were reporting no real damage to the harvest.
An Irish Farmers Association spokeswoman said its officials had reported that in Limerick, most of the saved crops of hay and silage had been moved from land before the flooding started last weekend.
"The relatively good weather of the week before had meant that the deficit in harvesting silage and hay had been recovered and that was one of the busiest weeks of the year," she said.
"Up until then, the reports we were receiving showed that farmers were behind with their winter fodder harvest but they managed to catch up in that eight- day period."
However, while the weather has been unsettled over most of the country, it has not been uniformly bad across the country.
Munster and Leinster appear to have experienced the worst of the heavy rainfall over the past 10 days and this is leading to some concern over the yields from spring cereal crops which have yet to be harvested.
While cereal farmers are expecting high yields from their spring barley and wheat crops, there have been reports of "lodging", that is the flattening of some of the grain crops, especially in the southern part of the country where the majority of grain is grown.
A spokesman for Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority, said this was a valley week in the grain harvest which would begin in earnest in about 10 days. He said that most of the winter barley which had been planted was already harvested and that yields were good but not dramatic.
"The winter oats crop is now almost ready for harvesting and it has been suffering from heavy rainfall because it has a longer straw and tends to lie down if the weather is bad.
"The bulk of the spring planted crops has yet to be harvested and will be taken, depending on weather conditions and where the farms are in the country over the next two to three weeks," the spokesman said.
"Right now there is no real urgency about getting these harvested but if the wet weather continues for another few weeks, then we will have a major problem."
He added that there had been a significant increase in the amount of cereals planted in the State this year.
Teagasc experts, he said, had estimated that there had been an increase of 19/20 per cent in the land tilled for cereal crops.
Maize, the other major winter fodder crop, would not be harvested until October and was not in difficulty.