As we did last year where we commented on the rainfall in 2017, this time we will give you some details of the rain fallen in 2018 in our area. In fact, they are very local data which are obtained from our meteorological station. However, they can be quite representative of the whole of central Spain. Both the north and the south of Spain have a very different behaviour because there the rainfalls are much higher or lower (depending on the area).
As a summary, the year 2018 can be considered a good year in terms of harvest and a very rainy year. The total rainfall was 551mm which is a very high figure especially because the months of February, March and April were very abundant in water. We also explained in this post that even some crops were damaged by too much rain in June as was the spring garlic, but for cereal, pulse and woody crops it was fantastic. We also suffered from the abundance of water in some fields that were fertilized early (January or February) and because the precipitation was so large that the fertilizer was lost and the plant could not assimilate it at the right rate. Even so, the harvest was quite good, for example, reaching an average barley of about 3,500 kg/ha on fields without irritation systems.
If we focus on the rains by seasons, winter is the season of the year where it rains the most as is normal in Spain. It is also very normal that during summer the rain is minimal and if there is some precipitation is usually torrential in some cases as happened in 2017. This lack of water is the reason why farmers have stopped planting sunflowers in our area who have opted for the legume that is giving us very good results.
Finally, with regard to the annual rainfall, if we look at the rainfall over the last 4 years we realise that is not stable, so we have to continue with the uncertainty of the water every time that we look at our crops.
Versión en español.
