By David Lawrie

I AM sure I am not the only young (ish) person who, growing up on a farm, would often hear grandparents and parents reeling off some distant date from yesteryear when there was a particularly extreme weather event that left its stamp on agriculture in that year: “Oh you should have seen the rain in the summer of 19 blah blah blah”; or “It’s nothing like the winds we had back in 1980 something or other.”

I am also sure that I am not the only young person who rolled their eyes and thought that said family member was getting a bit nostalgic in their later years.

However as we reach the end of a particularly trying October 2019, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll be that very same old codger in years to come, who talks vividly to the younger generation about the extreme weather we have witnessed over the last few years.

I’ll kick it off with gusto describing the extreme and prolonged cold that hit when the Beast from the East landed in early 2018, when the milking parlour froze whilst we were working in it and the supermarket shelves were left barren due to the motorways being impassable. In the middle of my tale will be the long hot summer of 2018, where it pretty much never rained the whole of July and we were finished harvest before September was even upon us.

Then I’ll talk of the bumper growing season of 2019 where grass and straw was coming out of our ears, and then if I’ll round the whole tale off with the woes of harvest and drilling 2019, where two dry days were a luxury and we thought the bags of wheat seed would sit on the shed floor well into 2020.

No doubt just like I did when I was younger, the next generation pretending to listen to me will also roll their eyes and say something to humour an old man. But the truth is I now have a much better understanding of how our farm and business can be affected by the one thing we have zero control over. And as stressful as they are at the time, I believe for someone starting in their farming career, these extreme weather events can really help shape them as they go forward in their farming journey.

Whether it is practical things like knowing where all the pipes that could freeze are and how to drain them when arctic weather looks like attacking, or discovering where the wet patches are in fields because you’ve had the grain trailer stuck in every single one. Or the less obvious things like how extreme weather can have a lasting impact on the running of a farm business long after it has passed by. A long and dry summer last year resulted in poor yields which meant buying in expensive loads of grain and straw which still has an impact on cash flow even as we see 2019 near an end.

I know I’m preaching to the converted when it comes to weather here but I hope I’ve managed to get my point across that farming for a large part is about taking what’s thrown at you and dealing with it at the time. And maybe more importantly for those of us in the infancy of our careers, it’s about learning from the hard times and using that knowledge as we carry on our farming journey.