Parts of western Denmark received 80mm of rain during the early days of last week. And the impact of the bad weather was very easy to see in the direct aftermath of the deluge.
Field after field of freshly planted winter barley and wheat crops resembled the trenches of World War I.
Large volumes of lying water gathered at the bottom of fields, with the lagoons that had formed choked with the topsoil driven down from the more elevated parts of the affected areas.
Bad weather
I happened to be in Denmark as part of a visiting group of representatives from the Irish Farm Buildings Association.
The scale of the destruction that greeted me was almost on a par with the carnage caused by the floods in Co. Tyrone’s Glenelly Valley a number of years ago.
The affected farmers in Denmark will now have a major job in front of them, re-constructing (literally) their fields.
The floods could not have come at a worse time for them. Freshly germinated cereal crops did not have the root mats developed that would have helped to mitigate the impact of the sudden deluge.
I know that we often talk about the challenging weather conditions that farmers in Ireland often confront, but the scale of the carnage that I observed on the outskirts of Aarhus was of biblical proportions.
And all of this comes directly after one of the most challenging years in living memory for tillage farmers across Europe.
Weather in Ireland
In Ireland, weather problems persisted throughout the 2023 growing season with spring cereal crops most affected.
Yes, there were a couple of dry days over the past weekend, but will the good weather stick? I wouldn’t risk the house on it.
Farmers are totally reliant on the weather playing ball with them. Where crops are concerned, the all-important periods for growers kick-in at planting time and, of course, the harvest.
It takes a lot of commitment to come out of one bad harvest and then start into another equally difficult growing season.
And this is exactly what’s being demonstrated by tillage farmers both in Ireland – and across Europe – at the present time.
The reality is that many tillage farmers are facing into a new season, knowing full well that the returns generated from 2022/2023 will not cover the cost of going again now.
But it’s hard not to truly feel for those farmers in Denmark, following the floods that wreaked havoc on their fields and freshly planted crops last week.
Let’s hope that they have a fair wind at their backs over the coming weeks.