Ireland’s climate is now warmer, wetter and sunnier. This poses significant challenges for crop production, necessitating adaptive farming practices. Key impacts include extreme weather, shifts in crop suitability and new threats from weeds, pests and diseases.
Heavy rainfall during planting and harvesting periods has resulted in significant yield losses in recent seasons. Another consequence of heavy rainfall is nutrient runoff, leading to nitrogen and phosphate loss. Wet conditions also increase disease risks, like fusarium affecting grain quality and rust species thriving due to mild winters. Summer droughts disproportionately affect yield in crops like beans and spring barley, and lead to nutrient imbalances (fertiliser applied versus crop yield).
Pest populations, such as aphids, increase due to milder winters, which allows them to complete more reproductive cycles, leading to greater potential for virus spread.
Adaptive strategies
Crop rotation and optimising the crop mix is one of the key adaptive strategies for tillage farmers. Having a range of crops with different planting and harvesting dates, helps to mitigate the risks related to both drought and excessive rainfall.
Cover cropping, conservation tillage and organic manures help to improve soil resilience to extreme weather events by improving soil organic content and by enhancing water retention and nutrient availability, making crops more resilient to both droughts and floods.
Pest and disease control measures will evolve alongside these climate shifts. Monitoring systems and predictive models for pest behaviour, such as those under development for barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV), are crucial for early intervention. Selecting varieties better suited to withstand new climate patterns is a key adaptive strategy, eg disease resistance.
Overall, adopting integrated pest management (IPM) strategies that combine biological, physical and chemical controls can create more robust pest defence systems.
In the future, annual yield of grass is expected to slightly increase. However, most of the increase in grass growth comes from an increase during the winter and spring months.
Grass growth is predicted to decrease in the months of July to September for the midlands and east coast (the more easterly the higher the decrease). In terms of variability between years, summer growth seems to be the most variable with an increase in the frequency of summer droughts, such as the one of 2018.
While the increase in growth in the winter looks like a positive, trafficability may be a challenge as rainfall is forecasted to increase in the winter and spring months. It may not be possible to take advantage of the increase in growth in the spring months, through increased grass utilisation, if soil conditions restrict grazing.
On-farm grazing infrastructure will have to be improved to ensure good access to paddocks early in the year, especially if the increase of spring growth is also associated with an increase in rainfall.
On the other hand, the decrease in growth in the summer, combined with an important increase in the variability during the months of July to September, will lead to increased challenges for summer and autumn grass management. This could have repercussions and cause difficulty in creating adequate forage stocks for winter feeding.
Some extreme years will be associated with very poor or even no growth in some of the summer months. While rare, this will become more frequent in the future.
Farmers will need to increase their silage and forage stocks to ensure adequate buffer feed is available during those periods. It will also be important that the forage is of high quality to maintain milk output.
Future climate projections indicate an increase in seasonal temperatures, a decrease in summer rainfall in the easterly regions and an increase in winter storms.
The impact of rising temperatures may result in earlier bud burst for a range of species and an increase in the length of the growing season. Thus, providing opportunities to expand the range of suitable species and varieties for use in Irish forestry.
There may be some positive effects with potential to increase the productivity of forests, where species are adapted to these warmer conditions.
Trees from warmer climates and southern locations may become more suitable in Ireland. One method to assess how trees may respond to climate change is the use of dendrochronology or the use of tree rings. These store valuable data on tree growth in relation to past climatic events.
We can relate the growth of trees to past events and from that use future climate change predictions to assess climate resilience. This would allow us to use this information for species selection for sustainable timber production.
Historical growth patterns
Assessing historical growth patterns in trees and their response to changing climate can be used to assess if tree species are adapted for future climates.
Warmer winter and summer temperatures may also present conditions for increased incidence of pests and pathogens, so adaptation strategies will have to utilise varieties with increased tolerance to diseases.
To reduce the risk of potential harmful pests and pathogens, innovative measures to aid the detection of pathogens are being researched.
Horizon scanning of pests and pathogens to assist in the national surveillance, detection and protection of our valuable forest resources will assist with increasing resilience of Ireland’s forests. An increase in winter storms will require adaptation of forest management strategies, including the design of more wind-firm forests to reduce risk.
Ongoing research into adaptation and resilience being conducted in Teagasc include the Fit-Forest and AdaptForRes projects funded by the Department of Agriculture. Both projects focus on increasing the resilience of forests by examining the planting material and the adaptive potential of this material.
Research will also investigate management strategies to increase the sustainability of forest sinks to reduce emissions from the forest resource.
Ireland’s climate is now warmer, wetter and sunnier. This poses significant challenges for crop production, necessitating adaptive farming practices. Key impacts include extreme weather, shifts in crop suitability and new threats from weeds, pests and diseases.
Heavy rainfall during planting and harvesting periods has resulted in significant yield losses in recent seasons. Another consequence of heavy rainfall is nutrient runoff, leading to nitrogen and phosphate loss. Wet conditions also increase disease risks, like fusarium affecting grain quality and rust species thriving due to mild winters. Summer droughts disproportionately affect yield in crops like beans and spring barley, and lead to nutrient imbalances (fertiliser applied versus crop yield).
Pest populations, such as aphids, increase due to milder winters, which allows them to complete more reproductive cycles, leading to greater potential for virus spread.
Adaptive strategies
Crop rotation and optimising the crop mix is one of the key adaptive strategies for tillage farmers. Having a range of crops with different planting and harvesting dates, helps to mitigate the risks related to both drought and excessive rainfall.
Cover cropping, conservation tillage and organic manures help to improve soil resilience to extreme weather events by improving soil organic content and by enhancing water retention and nutrient availability, making crops more resilient to both droughts and floods.
Pest and disease control measures will evolve alongside these climate shifts. Monitoring systems and predictive models for pest behaviour, such as those under development for barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV), are crucial for early intervention. Selecting varieties better suited to withstand new climate patterns is a key adaptive strategy, eg disease resistance.
Overall, adopting integrated pest management (IPM) strategies that combine biological, physical and chemical controls can create more robust pest defence systems.
In the future, annual yield of grass is expected to slightly increase. However, most of the increase in grass growth comes from an increase during the winter and spring months.
Grass growth is predicted to decrease in the months of July to September for the midlands and east coast (the more easterly the higher the decrease). In terms of variability between years, summer growth seems to be the most variable with an increase in the frequency of summer droughts, such as the one of 2018.
While the increase in growth in the winter looks like a positive, trafficability may be a challenge as rainfall is forecasted to increase in the winter and spring months. It may not be possible to take advantage of the increase in growth in the spring months, through increased grass utilisation, if soil conditions restrict grazing.
On-farm grazing infrastructure will have to be improved to ensure good access to paddocks early in the year, especially if the increase of spring growth is also associated with an increase in rainfall.
On the other hand, the decrease in growth in the summer, combined with an important increase in the variability during the months of July to September, will lead to increased challenges for summer and autumn grass management. This could have repercussions and cause difficulty in creating adequate forage stocks for winter feeding.
Some extreme years will be associated with very poor or even no growth in some of the summer months. While rare, this will become more frequent in the future.
Farmers will need to increase their silage and forage stocks to ensure adequate buffer feed is available during those periods. It will also be important that the forage is of high quality to maintain milk output.
Future climate projections indicate an increase in seasonal temperatures, a decrease in summer rainfall in the easterly regions and an increase in winter storms.
The impact of rising temperatures may result in earlier bud burst for a range of species and an increase in the length of the growing season. Thus, providing opportunities to expand the range of suitable species and varieties for use in Irish forestry.
There may be some positive effects with potential to increase the productivity of forests, where species are adapted to these warmer conditions.
Trees from warmer climates and southern locations may become more suitable in Ireland. One method to assess how trees may respond to climate change is the use of dendrochronology or the use of tree rings. These store valuable data on tree growth in relation to past climatic events.
We can relate the growth of trees to past events and from that use future climate change predictions to assess climate resilience. This would allow us to use this information for species selection for sustainable timber production.
Historical growth patterns
Assessing historical growth patterns in trees and their response to changing climate can be used to assess if tree species are adapted for future climates.
Warmer winter and summer temperatures may also present conditions for increased incidence of pests and pathogens, so adaptation strategies will have to utilise varieties with increased tolerance to diseases.
To reduce the risk of potential harmful pests and pathogens, innovative measures to aid the detection of pathogens are being researched.
Horizon scanning of pests and pathogens to assist in the national surveillance, detection and protection of our valuable forest resources will assist with increasing resilience of Ireland’s forests. An increase in winter storms will require adaptation of forest management strategies, including the design of more wind-firm forests to reduce risk.
Ongoing research into adaptation and resilience being conducted in Teagasc include the Fit-Forest and AdaptForRes projects funded by the Department of Agriculture. Both projects focus on increasing the resilience of forests by examining the planting material and the adaptive potential of this material.
Research will also investigate management strategies to increase the sustainability of forest sinks to reduce emissions from the forest resource.
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