Irish farmers will tell you that to qualify for EU Disaster Fund support you need to suffer a major catastrophe - like the Rhine bursting its banks and swallowing up your farm.
Ireland's grain growers may not quite be in that category, but as Wexford farmer, Mr John Cullen, puts it: "For us this year, the Rhine fell out of the sky."
For the first time in 18 years as a cereal producer, Mr Cullen faces the prospect of having to abandon some of his crops and leave them rotting in the fields.
The shock of finding himself in this situation is compounded by the fact that until a few weeks ago, things had never looked so good.
"I've been sowing corn since I left school and I'd say it was one of the best-looking harvests I ever had, until the August bank holiday weekend," he says, as he surveys the dismal scene on his 300acre farm at Maxboley, Duncormick, near the southeast coast.
Spring was "great" and, unusually, Mr Cullen had his three main crops - spring wheat, spring oats and spring malting barley - sown by the end of March.
"They looked powerful and then came the August weekend, when it started to rain on Sunday and just rained non-stop for four days."
When a recovery of sorts looked imminent, another bout of heavy rain last Tuesday and Wednesday put him back to square one. "As bad as it looked a week ago, it looked an awful lot worse after that," he said.
Crops that stood golden in the midsummer sunshine now lie on the ground, discoloured, sprouting new growths brought on by the humid August weather, and rotting underneath.
Mr Cullen would normally expect to have the entire crop harvested by now, instead, about 160 of the 185 acres he uses for cereals remain unharvested, with crops lying in the fields.
Whatever he does manage to salvage will be of poor quality and consequently worth a lot less than he might have expected.
The 25 acres of malting barley he did manage to harvest was rejected by the local buyer for Guinness and deemed good enough for animal feed only. That leaves the farmer with £65 a ton for a crop which, last year, brought in nearly twice that amount - though prices in general are much lower this year.
He hopes to salvage up to three-quarters of his 55 acres of spring wheat. But he could lose between 50 and 100 per cent of his spring oats to the weather.
"It's make or break now. If the weather improves, we've a chance of saving some of it, but if it rains any more we can just close the gate on it."
His immediate problem is not so much the poor state of his crops, as the softness of the ground, which could not support a combine harvester. If it remains dry until Wednesday the salvage operation will begin.
If not, Mr Cullen faces losses of between £30,000-£40,000. He dismisses the suggestion that this merely demonstrates how lucrative grain farming must be in the first place, if such losses are sustainable. "The last two years have been good, but 1993 was a very bad harvest and I lost a lot of money. To be honest, if it's going to be like this, one bad year, then a couple of good ones, and then another bad one, it will be very difficult to continue."
Cereal farmers now receive a bigger proportion of their income from EU direct payments than ever before. But Mr Cullen points out that these Area Aid payments are merely designed to compensate for price reductions brought about by the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.
"Oats cost between £180 and £190 an acre to grow, whereas Area Aid pays only £110 an acre," he says. "It's too early to say, but if I do end up with a loss of £30,000-£40,000, there is going to be a big question mark over me ever sowing grain again."
