SUMMER ORGANIC GROWING: PADDY FIELDS IN PADDY'S FIELDS

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SUMMER ORGANIC GROWING: PADDY FIELDS IN PADDY'S FIELDS

“In my 36 years as a grower there have been around 5/6 major weather extremes. This is an average of one roughly every 6 years which gives you 5 years to recover, not bad really, 1 in 6 - a fighting chance. But if you only started as a grower 6 years ago then you would have experienced 3 weather extremes - one every two years that is a lot of very bad weather to deal with in a very short space of time.”

So says Iain Tolhurst of Thames Valley Organic Growers, in a letter that has been doing the rounds amongst despondent growers in Ireland and Britain in recent weeks.

"I have farmed all my life but I can honestly say this year has been the worst year in my career for growing horticultural produce."

That's from Ben Brunning who ran a box scheme in Devon until the rain and rising costs convinced him to stop and to concentrate on wholesaling only.

About 3/4 of his crops failed - "everything has either been drowned by rain or is not growing through lack of sun...plants can't cope with the stress of going from drought to flood,” he said, citing the very varied weather conditions of recent times.

The situation is much the same here in Ireland for growers. I attended a farm walk in Cloughjordan Tipperary a couple of weeks back (pictured) and despite a few good recent August and September days, the weeks and weeks of rain have left an indelible mark, with saturation point in some places.

An organic grower in Wicklow could reportedly only watch as his broccoli plants were washed down the river after a deluge.

Growers everywhere joke of Paddy Fields next year, but you get the feeling people are laughing rather than crying at times.

Problems seem to be compounding problems: a mild Winter, a warm late Spring, and an incredibly wet Summer have meant that options for growers are now severely restricted.

Slugs in particular have been, in a word, relentless.

I have even heard stories of slugs getting into supposedly completely slug proof propagating areas, high off the ground with treated table or bench legs to prevent the slugs climbing up them. The slugs climb up the sides of the polytunnels and, eventually, a couple of them drop into the propagating trays, mate, and hey presto. The growers who tell me these things give something of an impression that the slugs are doing this consciously, almost as an army.

Duncan Healy's family have been growing organically for 30 years in Wicklow. This too is the worst year he has experienced: “There was a tiny improvement in August, but May and June were disaster” he tells me.

“The slugs have had huge impacts. They were going for everything, there were so many of them, they were even eating leeks” he tells me.

“Right now, and since July, lots of root crops haven't grown – they are stagnating in the ground. There's a lack of oxygen in the ground because of the water-logging. And there is no ground available to plant,” says Healy. “We've ran out of prepared ground – what we have is too wet. We had to move into tunnels with lettuce mid July”

“Carrots and Apples have been a disaster: the late frost took the apples and slugs wiped out the carrots. The brassicas were damaged by birds and of course by the slugs - they needed a bit more heat”

Weeds have come on faster and are swamping out plants. This is in part because water-logging has meant that growers have not being able to weed mechanically, as their machinery was just too heavy to go into the wet fields. And growers who do go into waterlogged fields risk, and know they risk, damaging the soil.

But its not all bad news – next post, we will look at some of the solutions, such as they are, to growing in extreme weather conditions.

That's our discussion regarding SUMMER ORGANIC GROWING: PADDY FIELDS IN PADDY'S FIELDS

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