It’s as if somebody let a relief valve off in the business but the last 12 months have been the most challenging I’ve encountered.

There are any amount of column inches dedicated to moaning about the weather so I’m going to be brief. It rained every four days when we didn’t want it and then it didn’t rain when we did.

That’s a bit of an issue for a business like ours with crops that need water at certain times and don’t really want too much at other times.

In terms of the winter, we came through it only for the investment we made a few years back in chaser bins that have tandem-axle, low ground pressure 710s. They earned their bread in the winter gone by allowing us to keep all trailers off the field and giving us flexibility around harvest.

Since then, the investment in irrigation has stood to us. At one point, we had four irrigation reels running 24 hours a day to keep crops watered during an unprecedented drought.

We have been chipping away over the last few years adding weather mitigation equipment, irrigation, straw-laying equipment for frost protection, chaser bins to keep trailers off the field and the machines to operate the above but all that comes at a cost – a fairly substantial capital investment cost.

There are a lot of growers who for various reasons are in a situation where they couldn’t get water to crops during the drought. It’s pretty grim and your heart would break looking at what were excellent crops now looking close to something that only a rotovator will go through. In terms of the costs of mitigating the drought, the level of investment in irrigation needed is only barely justifiable over taking the crop loss in an extreme year. It’s not a straightforward decision.

One way or another, the cost of growing crops in the last number of years seems to be sky-rocketing with not only weather-related costs and losses, but also a never ending increasing labour bill.

Traditionally, in a situation like this, the produce from the UK or the continent where they wouldn’t have had the same issues would undermine the cost of Irish produce but this year the problems are all over Europe and the UK, so fresh produce of any kind is in very short supply.

With the rain coming, new challenges are emerging with further weed flushes coming in the crop, disease burden increasing and the decision whether to lift irrigation pipes is on us.

The lifting of irrigation pipe is a big one for us at the moment as the fear would be that we would tempt fate too much and prompt another prolonged dry period.

We are so scarred from the last 12 months that we aren’t sure whether to fear a prolonged dry period or another prolonged wet period.

We don’t mind if this is the new normal, if it is we can cut our cloth to fit but it’s the uncertainty that is causing the issues.