Organic Farming Weather Watchers with Barra Best


Organic Farming

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'Today, I'm in County Down to meet up

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'with organic farmer John McCormick.'

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-How are you?

-I'm very well, thank you.

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-It's perfect weather for the old garden, isn't it?

-Beautiful.

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Beautiful day.

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'John is passionate about growing organic food,

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'locally produced and completely dependent

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'on our Northern Irish climate.'

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John, here we are, your field of tunnels, different veg in every one?

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That's right. This is a row of four of our larger tunnels

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and we'd have a four-year rotation going on between the four of them.

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You see some kohlrabi in there, that was carrots in there first

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and now it's kohlrabi and then it will be salad.

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So different veg planted throughout the year?

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At least three crops per tunnel.

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John, a nice big tunnel here of cherry tomatoes.

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They've done well with our weather this year.

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Yes, I'm very pleased with them, they're called Sakura.

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They're a very sweet tomato,

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so would be incredibly popular with children, as you can well imagine.

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And you have got your normal amount of crops for this year?

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Yes, by and large, the cropping would appear to be good,

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where we normally go for seven or eight trusses,

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this is a truss, they start at the bottom and, you know,

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work right up to the last truss at the top.

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This would be the eighth truss on this,

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but they're actually doing very well.

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Very well, so another few weeks left

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and these boys here will be ready to pick.

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Five, six weeks before I start taking them out.

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'Food is a requirement for all life

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'but we need the right weather to grow it.'

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What can you do here that you can't in the west?

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I suppose we're blessed, in the sense that

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if you want to be a vegetable grower, certainly,

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you're far better off over here on the east coast

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than you ever would be on the west coast.

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We can just about grow everything, except bananas and citrus.

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What I have noticed is we seem to be getting extremes.

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We're breaking records, left, right and centre -

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we're getting the hottest days that have ever happened in the year,

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we're getting the wettest days that have ever happened in the year.

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These nets, John,

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do a good job protecting against pests and rabbits,

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that kind of thing, but they also protect against our bad weather.

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That's right, we're finding, increasingly,

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that in the summertime, we're getting very, very heavy rainfall

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and the result of that

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is it splashes the mud back up all over the lettuce

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and makes it unsellable, so the nets act as a barrier,

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so when the rain hits that, it diffuses,

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and you don't get that splash.

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You also keep bees here. How has the weather affected them?

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2015 has not been one of the great bee years.

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We had a cold May, which wouldn't have been nice for the bees,

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but they were busy enough and survived it

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and managed to build up to a decent brood size for June

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and then we had a nice June, we had a good June,

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so the bees were very busy in June and there was plenty of nectar

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and pollen around and they started to bring in a lot of reserves.

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But then July turned wet and by the end of August, because we had

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another wet August, they had already started to eat into those reserves.

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There can be up to 50,000 or 60,000 bees in a colony.

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And they all need to be fed every day

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and if they can't get out to feed, they will eat their reserves.

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So we won't be taking much honey off the bees this year,

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simply because we want to leave them with the reserves that are there.

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