Too much rain, too short periods of good weather and too violent thunderstorms, sometimes with hail – that is, in a nutshell, the sobering result of the summer so far. Regional agriculture suffers particularly as a result, many farmers in the district of Ebersberg have to reckon with a lower harvest than usual.
“It can’t really rain enough for potatoes,” says farmer Franz Rauch junior from Neufarn. But the sheer endless rain in the past few weeks was possibly too much. The potato farmer expects quality and yield losses. The thunderstorms with hailstorms at the end of June in particular had harmed his potato plants, said Rauch. The problem is that fungi and bacteria can quickly colonize the injured parts of the plant. The expert calls this “increased fungal pressure”. Nevertheless, Rauch does not give up hope for this year’s harvest: “It is not yet too late.”
The potatoes from Franz Lenz, farmer in Zorneding and district chairman of the farmers’ association, are currently still in the ground. The current weather means that “we’re pretty late this year”. The community of Zorneding was spared from damage caused by hail, but the “humid and warm weather” caused problems for fruit, vegetables and grain. For farmers like Lenz, this increases the workload enormously. Even if Lenz does not expect a total failure of the potatoes, there is still the risk that the harvested and stored potatoes will start to rot later. “It would be important now that we have ten to 14 days of good weather throughout,” said Lenz.
Katharina Binsteiner, Head of Agriculture at the Office for Food, Agriculture and Forests (AELF) Ebersberg-Erding, explains that the fields would no longer dry out because of the persistent rain. This not only results in losses in the potato harvest, but also in harvest delays in the case of grain. “This year we are simply harvesting two weeks later,” said Binsteiner. The winter had already lasted a long time, and May was also very cold then, she sums up. But while the potato and grain harvest is putting farmers under pressure, the silage maize is at least “bombastic”. All in all, Binsteiner thinks the district still got off well. “That was just a mixed summer, but we are no longer used to it,” said the expert.
“The whole thing also has advantages: We had to water less,” says Florian Böck, owner of the Böck nursery in Neufarn, and tries to counter the frequent rainy weather with a little humor. Nevertheless, the Böck family business has not made it through the summer so far without restrictions. The rains not only had an impact on their cultivation in the open. The water dammed up on the greenhouses and eventually ran into it.
But the area that was most affected, of course, was the field, of which the Böcks cultivate around 100 hectares per year. The business owner recorded particularly severe damage to lettuce and cabbage plants. He blames the thunderstorms with strong winds. “The problem with lettuce is that there are no pesticides for it. The heads of lettuce simply rot.” But Böck can also derive something positive from this fact. Since the lettuce harvest is extremely bad in many places in Bavaria, he can benefit from it and sell a lot. Despite many a rotten head of lettuce, around 20 to 25 percent of each of his fields remained. “By default, we factor in losses and therefore plant more,” says Böck. So there is no total failure with him either.
Florian Böck answered with a clear no, at least for his products, whether the mixed harvest would also affect prices.