No quitten we're whelan onto chitchat 12.

Maybe true in the past.

Not now.

2017 we got burned out by 2 young divkheads without a spark of sense a couple of miles away burning digger heaps. It burned about 8 to 900 acres of mountain.

There were 16 farmers affected. Total cost I don't know but in the hundreds of thousands.

My 80 year old father and a neighbour who was in bed sick were out fighting it alongside me. All 3 of us were wrecked for weeks after from smoke inhalation and over-exertion.

No payments till 2019 after a massive sustained battle with the department. It nearly broke a few of the lads with young families. I had one child and one on the way and was struggling but I had other income.

The people lighting fires these days are the local half-idiot who has a grudge against someone and is too stupid or unaffected himself to understand what he's doing. Or just bad baxtard Arsonists.

There should be jail and malicious damage cases following it at this stage.

There were several farmers I know in the barracks this morning making statements over the last few days carry on. I hope they succeed because they're decent people having their livelihoods threatened by fecking blackguards...

Read your last line again.

There has to be evidence for someone to be found guilty.

Example. I was selling some land near some troublesome neighbours. I was thinking one morning my For Sale signs were lasting a long time with no one tampering with them. Sure enough that morning there they were gone. My neighbours were "guilty as sin" until I hid a camera nearby and caught someone completely different doing it.

It isn't good enough to blame a landowner for their land getting burnt just because their name is on the deed. It isn't good enough to imply, or even straight out say that on hill land other share holders know whodunnit.

It's a perversion of justice, a box ticking exercise to be seen to be doing something. Someone has to be held to account, who doesn't really matter once the mob's appetite for "justice" is sated. Everyone ought to be equal before the law. But in Ireland, those of us who farm this type of land are guilty the second we're born into it.

Yea, that's the one. He should've got a life sentence like his victim.

I hope that his victim takes proper compensation off him now.

He's well off as he has inherited a couple houses and money from relatives in the past

Good god that’s shocking, I suppose when you grow up in an area where that’s farming practice it seems normal but from the outside you have to wonder if the risk is worth it.

I'm saying the authorities took a zero tolerance approach to try and change the culture.

That approach is wrong. It may change the culture of the landowners (largely it has) but that's of no use to those who come light the fires and then swan off away leaving others to pick up the pieces and suffer the consequences

Apart from the rhodo, the other vegetation is only doing good, building organic matter, biodiversity and limiting erosion and nutrient leaching.

People had to resort to trying to grow potatoes in the hills once too, leaving that behind wasn't a bad thing.

And let us never forget that hundreds of thousands perished trying to survive whilst ship loads of cattle, sheep, fish, wheat, barley, oats and veg like carrots, turnips, brassicas (cabbage, kale, nips, sprouts etc) were exported to Britain.

I googled Michael Gaine a few days back and this popped up on YouTube just now. Big brother is watching you, eh?

Folks is there a quick reference table or calculator for spraying. I’ve the knapsack spray course done but not boom (yet)

2 litres Dockstar

I was told 300l water

Red nozzle tips

2.5 Bar pressure

5kph.

Does that sound close ?

There's a lot gone but a nice few of us still here on hill farms.

It's more the structure of the payments and the unprofitability of hill sheep that are causing the overgrowth. I could carry 3 times as many sheep in summer as in winter. You couldn't keep the fionán eaten. Too many people keeping the bare number to draw the payments (Im at double) Hard to blame them though with full time jobs as well. I'm off for a few months every winter.

Cows, or 3 year old bullocks would eat fionán down well but not young cattle. But the type of cows most lads have now won't thrive on it nor rear a right calf on it in the numbers to keep it eaten.

Big furze used to be cut and chopped for cattle or horses to eat, once upon a time. Liotar (the small type) used to be cut for bedding or burnt if it got too strong. Always small patches at a time so that you wouldn't destroy/starve everything.

It's hard to see the right way forward, - when the payments were per ewe only, the hills were full of sheep and most would agree overgrazed. It's the opposite now.

Perhaps the way forward is strategic fencing where lower or middle marginal sections are completely closed off to animals thus rapidly becoming forest, and the higher rockier areas grazed lightly with sheep goats or Dexters or similar. The improved fields at the bottom would have to be maintained well though.

The fencing and maintenance of same would need to be all galvanized steel and deer proof.

An expensive solution.

a good neighbor indeed.

Frosts every night here still. Grass is barely moving. We’re just anbove 600ft altitude and in a bit of a frost pocket.
amazing seeing lads here talk about being on their third spread of fert. We wouldn’t see last frosts until late May and we would have first frosts returning mid September.

Coincidentally I was listening to a podcast yesterday about life in Ireland during the famine.

https://www.podbean.com/ea/dir-9iheq-24caac83

Jesus that's late, we're between 5 and 600 but we get very little frost as we're on the slope.

I was listening to research from Lindhof in mid Sweden and they graze the cows from March to November!