The wooden crates stacked by the gate at Moore Produce are usually full by the third week of August. On the day I visit, almost all of them are empty. Just one, nearest the entrance, holds potatoes – small, round, many barely bigger than a marble.

Ask Anthony Moore what a potato that size represents, and he doesn’t take long to answer. ‘Just failure,’ he says. ‘That’s what it represents.’

We talk at a table in the staff canteen, the remains of a tea break still sitting there – empty cups and a plate of digestive biscuits going soft in the heat.

Outside, in a yard that would normally be busy with lorries and pickers, a white-and-marmalade cat is asleep on an old office chair. Two dogs are stretched out in the dust beside it, panting in the sun.

Farmer Anthony Moore of Moore Produce, a family run farm in Naul, Co Dublin, shows the results of the recent drought on his soil. Picture: Tom Honan

The farm in Naul, north county Dublin, has been in Anthony’s family for four generations, passing from his great-grandfather to his grandfather, to his father and now to Anthony, 36, and his brother Keith, 37. Today, they supply Tesco, SuperValu, Dunnes, Aldi and Lidl, with more than 14 staff working across potatoes, swede, cabbage and grain.

‘It’s a combination of the worst drought and the highest input costs,’ Anthony says when I ask if this is the worst year the business has had.

His earliest memories are of hand-harvesting turnips, coming home from school to find his father already out in the field.

‘We’d load them by hand into trailers,’ he says. ‘Bring them to the yard, take them out by hand, into the wash-up.

‘The trailer tipped up, and we were down the bottom of it, throwing them in – the rain beating in, the hailstones beating in. We didn’t know no better. You wanted to help your father, because he was on his own.’

He remembers it fondly.

‘Friday evening were out working,’ he says. ‘You didn’t just get pocket money, you earned it.’

Anthony Moore of Moore Produce says this year’s crop is in chronic condition. Picture: Tom Honan

The farm has grown enormously since those days – from around 20 acres of vegetables to roughly 180 acres of vegetables across a 1,200-acre operation.

‘Now it’s all mechanised, automation, AI, whatever we can do – we’ve machines in the packhouse that do it all themselves,’ Anthony says. ‘But the margins have got significantly tighter.’

His father farmed less land in his day, so the weather windows were not nearly as tight. They now grow such large volumes to meet supermarket demand that every spell of bad weather carries far more risk.

‘You’re either in it big or you’re not in it at all,’ he says. ‘If you’re not in it big, it’s not viable, you need another job.

‘And if you are in it big, there’s high pressure, there’s deadlines, there’s weather windows. You’re constantly moving big volumes, and be it too dry or too wet, that leads to pressure.’

He worries about what that pressure means for the next generation. ‘It’s not as appealing as it once was,’ he says. ‘We’ve neighbouring farms where kids don’t see a future in it.’

The farm came through a serious drought in 2018. ‘We got the rain in late July, and the crop was saved,’ Anthony recalls.

This year, the rain never came. June had been wet enough to get everything germinating and put moisture into the ground. By the end of the month, it was gone.

‘That young plant started to suffer – heatwave after heatwave,’ Anthony says. ‘It just spun them out.’

The company sells produce to supermarkets right across Ireland

His brother Keith started to see the problem in mid-July. They knew that if rain didn’t come by August, they were in trouble. It didn’t come and by the second week of August, the plants were visibly dying.

‘You could see them starting to go back into themselves,’ Anthony says. ‘Changing colour, going dead.’

Earlier this summer, the ground was so dry the farm had to go back to hand-harvesting for four to six weeks – something it hadn’t done in ten years.

‘It’s just desperate,’ Anthony says.

Fields that should be a deep, healthy green have turned patchy and pale, the leaves curling in on themselves under the heat. Swedes that should be the size of a pineapple are coming out more like tennis balls.

‘We normally do an 800g swede,’ Anthony says. ‘Now it’s at 650g, and we’re going to try and pull it back to 500g – a very small turnip.’

Potatoes that need to be golf-ball sized or bigger are, in places, no bigger than marbles. Some are smaller still.

‘Baby fingernail,’ Anthony says as a comparison. ‘Normally we’d have capacity here for 4,000 tonnes, this year we’d be lucky to get 2,000.’

They have been forced to tap into next year’s crop already

The farm has at least €1million invested in this year’s crop already, before the cost of keeping it alive through the drought is even added.

Two generator pumps have been running around the clock, drawing water from rivers. Six men have been working in shifts across the fields. Sprayers are going out at 9pm, 10pm, midnight and even 1am, when it is cooler, applying liquid seaweed, magnesium and calcium nitrate.

Diesel for July ran to €27,000. Across the summer, the fuel bill has reached around €35,000.

‘We should be getting double the price for what we grow but we’re not,’ he says.

Asked if he ever feels helpless walking the fields, he doesn’t hesitate. ‘Yeah.’

To keep supermarket orders going, the farm is now harvesting roughly 30 per cent more acreage than it normally would.

Crops that were meant to carry the business into spring are being used up now.

‘We could run out of crop in March next year,’ Anthony says, ‘and we won’t have turnover from March to July. That’s the knock-on.’

That crop was meant to carry the farm through the leanest months of the year. Now it is being used early, leaving a gap before the next harvest.

If the farm stuck to its normal supermarket specifications, some yields would fall to less than a third of what they are now, and the season could be finished by January. Instead, they are working with supermarkets to keep the shelves supplied for as long as possible.

Contracts were signed before anyone knew how dry the summer would become

In a normal year, a shortfall on Irish farms could be made up with imports from Britain or France.

‘There’s no extra supply anywhere,’ Anthony says, as the heatwaves have struck other countries too.

The farm’s contracts were signed in February, months before anyone knew how dry the summer would become. Since then, supermarkets have agreed to take smaller produce than the specifications allow for. Tesco is also promoting small swedes in triple packs – produce that would previously have struggled to make it on to the shelf.

‘Being honest, Tesco are the number one that’s helping us,’ Anthony says.

SuperValu, too, has been working with the farm to keep the crop moving. Both have increased the price paid to the farm since the contracts were agreed – first to cover the cost of storing the crop through the early summer, and again in July as the cost of irrigation began to soar.

Anthony does not expect the supermarkets to absorb those extra costs themselves. He knows who will eventually have to pay.

‘I have two kids and a family, and I wouldn’t expect people to pay double the price for something,’ he says. ‘But it’s going to have to happen, unfortunately.’

The worry follows him home. His wife sees him coming in late, he says, worried and unable to sleep. He has three weather apps on the go and checks them constantly.

‘You pray for days of rain, any day,’ he says.

By now, Anthony says, even a downpour would not save much of the crop.

‘It’s like your flowers in a flower pot at home,’ he says. ‘When they start dying off, you can’t bring them back to life. They’re finished.’

Anthony Moore says the past few months have been ‘mentally frustrating’. Picture: Tom Honan

There is an irony in it, Anthony believes. A turnip’s taproot should push down through the soil in search of moisture – but water applied from above gives it less reason to go deep.

‘It doesn’t know what to do,’ he says. ‘It can’t send its roots down.’

For Anthony, the past few months on the farm have been, as he puts it, ‘mentally frustrating’.

‘Very, very hard to put so much into something and not to see it pull through,’ he says.

Darragh McCullough is seeing the drought on his farm too. About 20 minutes north of Dublin Airport, he runs a mixed operation with around 540 dairy cows, alongside a flower business that has actually benefited from the weather.

‘Flowers actually love sunshine and dry conditions,’ he says.

The dairy herd, though, is another story entirely. For almost four weeks, the cows have been out in the fields eating winter silage and meal – feed that should be kept for January, not August, and certainly not the height of the grazing season.

There simply isn’t enough grass to keep them milking.

‘Irish dairy’s big competitive advantage is being able to grow cheap grass and get the cows out to eat it,’ he says. ‘That’s why over 90 per cent of the cows in the country are calved out every spring, so their appetite matches the grass.’

Feeding the herd this way is costing him around €14,000 a week. While the average dairy farmer has a much smaller herd, the extra feed bill is still running into thousands of euro. Darragh believes the drought could force a rethink of how dairy farming is done in Ireland, with more farmers eventually keeping cows indoors and feeding them maize and wheat from a pit, rather than relying so heavily on grass.

For Niall McCormack, who represents fruit and vegetable growers within the Irish Farmers’ Association, the trouble is already moving down the supply chain.

‘The impact on the supply chain is going to be very grim,’ he says. ‘Growers’ backs are against the wall, and unfortunately consumers are going to have to pay more for fruit and vegetables. Somebody has to bear the cost.’

He wants Government support to match the scale of the losses, but also says consumers need to understand what is behind the prices they will see in the shops in the months ahead.

‘Farmers are at the edge of their wits,’ he says. ‘Not getting the crop grown is really hard. It’s tough times for farmers.’

Niall  says this year’s dry spell has been driven by a persistent area of high pressure, drawing warm, dry air up from continental Europe. Temperatures, he believes, have also been ‘topped up’ by two to four degrees because of climate change.

The figures give some idea of just how much water is missing. By mid-August, soil moisture deficits across the south and east had reached 70-98mm. Put another way, between 700,000 and 980,000 litres of water per hectare would be needed simply to bring the soil back to normal.

Anthony and his brothers are already thinking about the next drought – whenever it comes. They are looking at building water lagoons, filling reservoirs from natural streams over winter and storing the water until it is needed during the dry months.

‘We need every drop we can get,’ he says. ‘You really have to think very far ahead. This mightn’t come again for five years, two years, ten years, but we want to be ready for it.’

Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon is due to visit the farm next week as part of a wider tour of drought-hit growers around the country. Anthony wants a subsidy linked to the scale of the losses this year – enough, he says, to get growers through this season and give them a chance of making it into the next. ‘Anything at all that could help a grower get through this year, to next year – that’s all we want,’ he says.

But for Anthony, getting through one bad harvest is only part of the worry. There are four generations of his family in this farm – the work his great-grandfather, grandfather and father put into it, and now the question of whether there will be a fifth generation to carry it on. ‘You feel the weight of that,’ he says. ‘You want to keep what they built going for the next generation.’