We have turned the corner into the new crop season with all our carrots and parsnips sown and standing. It’s always a relief when you see the rows starting to line with green as the crop emerges. The battle to keep them weed-free looms large as the volunteer cereals and a few broad-leaved weeds that the pre-ems missed are also breaking above ground.

Spring barley went in well after strawed carrots and I have high hopes for it in terms of yield potential, but I’m not as optimistic in terms of margin potential in the short term. We have started growing more cereals overall as a function of our root crop rotations but also I would be reasonably optimistic about the medium-term economics of cereal production. World markets are out of kilter and need to rebalance with higher grain prices, which I think will happen in time as marginal production areas in dryland North America and around the world comes back out of grain and back into cattle.

The daffodil crop is in great condition for the time of the year and threw out a huge crop of flowers this season. We grow just shy of 95 acres of the crop with the predominant destination Europe and the US. The main objective at this time of year is to keep them weed- and disease-free and allow the crop to wind down without any stress, pumping all its energy back down into the bulbs prior to harvest during the summer.

Timing of the rainfall

Carrot and parsnips went in in exceptional conditions over the last three months and we have been very lucky so far with the timing of the rainfall. It’s worth a good few quid to us when it rains at this time of year as the alternative is to pull out the irrigators and fire up the pumps and hours of labour managing them. When we started growing root crops, an irrigator was a luxury item for those exceptional dry times, now you can’t grow roots without irrigation with three of them on the books at home.

Around the yard, the lads have been busy ripping the washing line apart, reconditioning conveyors and making all the modifications we planned during the winter which couldn’t happen until we were in the off season. Trailers, harvesters and field equipment are all getting a going over also before being sent back out to work in August as the root veg season starts again.

All in all, I’m pretty happy about the condition the crops are in as we stand today. For some reason, I’m most excited about the barley, possibly because it’s much derided by the general farming public in Ireland – I think I’m rooting for the underdog.

I don’t think cereal farming would even be classified as being on the hind tit at the moment as I doubt we could afford to rent a teat off the dairy operators, but hopefully our shiny new Government will remember the tillage sector as well as our four-legged-following compatriots when it comes to policy and emergency supports.

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Farmer writes: GE16 results are mild compared to those for vegetable growers