“I am 68 years old and I have never experienced this in my life. We have not been able to work in our fields for seven months because of the rain that keeps falling. We are nowhere yet in preparing the land and sowing. The potatoes should have been planted by now. It is already too late for early onions,” sighs Guy Depraetere, spokesperson for the General Farmers Syndicate (ABS) and still a part-time farmer with his son.
On October 13 last year, the floodgates opened and never really closed again. Anyone who had not yet dug up his potatoes could no longer enter his field and had to leave them behind. The few dry days in between caused some puddles to disappear from the fields, but the subsoil remained exceptionally wet. “If you drive over it with a heavy tractor, you compress the soil too much. Then you destroy it and not much can grow afterwards,” Depraetere explains.
Due to the very wet autumn, hardly any winter wheat was sown. And it will be difficult for spring wheat, Depraetere knows. “Dry days are forecast for the second half of this week, but next week they will bring rain again.”
A few dry days are not enough to start sowing. Because the land must first be worked: fertilized, plowed, cultivated. Where possible, farmers are already spreading manure. The livestock farmers are also at a loss. Their manure cellars are overfull because the animal manure has not been spread for weeks due to the wet weather.
Loss of quality
“Potatoes are normally planted between April 10 and May 15. That may vary a bit, but there is not much stretch to it. Flax and spring wheat must have been sown long ago. Late sowing is often accompanied by a loss of yield and quality,” says Thijs Vanden Nest, agricultural manager at the Ilvo research institute. “Maize can be sown later, but the problem is time. Because if it becomes a bit drier, farmers will give priority to other crops, which may also make it too late for corn.”
Boerenbond spokesperson Elisabeth Mertens has figures available. “20 percent of the beets have been sown. Less than 20 percent of potatoes and corn. Very little of many vegetable crops such as peas and chicory.” Mertens indicates that the situation varies greatly throughout Flanders, depending on the rain in recent weeks and the water permeability of the subsoil.
No manure on Thursday
Farmer Patrick Lemahieu-Ameloot in Watou is one of the few lucky farmers who can already farm on their land. “We have had less rain in the region in recent days. But I hear from colleagues in Limburg that it is dramatic there. They still had to deal with liters of rain.”
Work is currently continuing at Lemahieu-Ameloot. The 150 hectares are worked with three tractors from 5 am to 11 pm. When we call the man around noon, he has just taken the cultivator off the tractor and is about to hang the plow on his tractor to plow for a few hours. “We sow flax at 4 p.m. That’s also very late in the year. Normally the flax comes after the potatoes, now it is the other way around. My wife makes sandwiches that we eat on the tractor in between.”
Depraetere of the ABS fears that once it dries out, farmers and contractors will have very little time to get out into the fields. Especially if it remains dry in the coming days, we will have to work very hard and for a long time. The contractors will be overworked and will be busy from early in the morning until late in the evening. And choices will have to be made. Activities that are usually spread over weeks must be completed in a few days.
“In addition, you are not allowed to spread manure on Sundays and public holidays. So with Our Lord’s Ascension on Thursday and the following Sunday we will miss two more days,” says Depreatere. He fears that it will be a poor agricultural year and that yields will be very disappointing. “The persistent rain reduces our year to five months.”
