Ireland's cereal farmers have been toppled by bad weather from their perch as the world's top producers of grain. Average yields of grain are expected to fall by at least half a tonne per acre for all of this year's crops, especially the main barley crops.
Harvesting of winter cereals (crops planted last winter) has already started and Teagasc, the agriculture and farm development authority, said returns were "disappointing". The drop in winter barley crop yield is expected to take 50,000 tonnes of barley off the market when harvesting is finished in three weeks.
Winter wheat, normally the second crop to be harvested, has been badly hit on southern farms by septoria tritici disease, which reduces yields.
The Teagasc crop report says winter oats look the most promising of the winter crops and while acreage is small, yields are unlikely to be as low as in the other winter crops when harvesting commences in the first week of August. The spring-planted crops have been showing some recovery but as it is too late to spray for disease, there is a general expectation of lower yields in these as well.
Mr Paddy Harrington, chairman of the Irish Farmers' Association's grain committee, said that if the Teagasc predictions come to pass there would be a serious shortfall this year.
"We could be looking at a shortfall of between half a million tonnes and 600,000 tonnes of grain this year, which would knock €54 million off growers' incomes," he said.
He said growers should insist they receive at least €100 per tonne for barley and said that some compounders had been paying just over this price.
Because of exceptional sowing conditions last autumn, a record sowing of 90,000 hectares of winter wheat was sown by farmers.
It is estimated that 165,000 hectares of spring barley was planted earlier in the year and these two crops account for the bulk of Irish grain production.