The 2024 winter barley harvest is underway. The coming days should see confirmation of the earliest, recorded yields, however, parts of the north-east received almost a month’s worth of rain this week.
What started out as a happy start to the combining season at the start of the week went quickly downhill with the 48 hours of rain that followed in some parts of the country.
In the meantime, the crows will have an opportunity to feast on those stands of winter crop that are now at ground level.
Admittedly, these are still early days. But the reality remains that Irish tillage farmers need, and deserve, a hassle-free harvest in 2024.
Yields are, obviously, important within any tillage operation. However, such was the madness of last autumn and winter, most cereal growers had already 2023/24 as a season in which record yields would be achieved.
Winter barley harvest
The main objective now is to stead the ship. From a practical point of view, this means getting crops off the ground in a timely fashion and sowing winter crops later this autumn in a similar manner.
Growers know that they already have the €100/ha additional support payment, promised by the government earlier in the year in their back pockets.
Depending on the actual yields achieved this year, this will be putting an extra €10 to €15/t on the crops that they do combine.
These payments could make all the difference between growers breaking even and making a loss. And, who knows, there might be more good news coming the way of the tillage sector courtesy of the 2025 Budget.
This week has seen the publication of the 2023/24 cropping areas by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM). They confirm no year-on-year change in the total area dedicated to arable crops in 2024.
However, it will come as no surprise to learn that the area of winter cereals is well down. This trend was, however, compensated for in the expansion of the acreage dedicated to spring cereals.
The DAFM figures confirm that area of non-cereal crops (protein crops, beet, maize and oilseed rape) in 2024 has increased from approximately 68,000ha in 2023 to 71,500ha in 2024.
This figure came as a bit of a surprise – I had sensed that the year-on-year increase in the area dedicated to maize crops had been extremely significant.