I’ve been watching the rain. I always do, on this property for 32 years, and for 10 or so years before that.
Richard Steele
So, I have not a bad idea of what’s happening, as I record the amount as well. I once thought that having this long-term data would one day prove to be of some use, or that was my excuse for having up to three gauges around the place at one time.
That was no good, as straight away it was obvious the gauges recorded different amounts from different sites around the garden. So, to see what was going on, I positioned them together in one spot, and lo and behold, they all still read different amounts.
I also proved two or three other ground breaking research discoveries that could lead to startling portents for the future.
Firstly, there is no pattern. I had thought, naively, that I could prove something that would be useful to our farming business. Not so. All I’ve proved so far is that there is no pattern that proves anything, as the rainfall I have recorded for all these years has no logic to it at all.
The second revelation is that people’s memories, including my own, are useless as well. Which is the wettest month, which is the driest? Surprisingly February wins on both counts. And what happened last week, last month, or last year, fades so quickly, from our minds as become not only totally irrelevant, but also totally useless.
It makes me wonder about centuries old cultures that rely on anecdotal historical information being passed down through generations. When challenged , most people can’t remember what happened last week.
Then in this wet spring , which is what started this train of thought, I wondered how other Octobers rated in the overall scheme of things, to the one we are enjoying now.
Three days before the end we were we exactly half way towards the wettest October, and three times more than the driest. Which is my point really, how do you plan your docking, your cropping, or anything else around that?
So, as I’m not docking, dagging or digging much at the moment, I’ll do what the rest of us older farmers do, and just carry on regardless.
The third lesson for me, is that my 40-plus year sample of weather pattern change is of a much too short a duration to prove anything about climate change, in any case.
