London, United Kingdom – In a wheat field near High Wycombe in the rolling English countryside, Alex Nelms watched the harvest on his farm die in a matter of days. His crop had looked strong until the first heatwave came in May, when temperatures surpassed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) just as his milling wheat entered its grain-fill phase, the critical weeks when the plant fattens its kernels. “It just killed everything stone dead,” he told Al Jazeera. “Everything was finished really early, and when we were sort of full of optimism and hope, it was scuppered almost overnight.” Nelms farms just over 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of arable land in south Buckinghamshire, on a business his grandparents founded in 1955. His uncle, who has worked the farm for more than 40 years, has just suffered the worst harvest of his career. Last month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said almost three-quarters of England, 71.3 percent, remained in drought.
Rainfall in August reached just 34 percent of what would normally be expected by that point in the month, Defra said, and reservoir levels were 18.2 percentage points below where they should be for the time of year. “We’re totally reliant on Mother Nature,” Nelms said, and nature did not deliver this year. After a historically dry spring and a run of summer heatwaves, the farm is down roughly 1,000 tonnes on its average harvest, a shortfall of some $270,000 in revenue. The farm, tucked in the Chiltern Hills, a steep, long ridge of white limestone rock, has no irrigation and never will. “That has serious knock-on effects on our cash flow,” he said. A third consecutive difficult year would mean hard conversations with his bank and landlord, and farming to minimise risk rather than maximise output, “consequently, probably producing less food”.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) says farmers are at a “financial crisis point” after the worst drought in 50 years, with historically low harvests, stunted grass growth, rising fuel and fertiliser costs, and a severe outbreak of bluetongue disease in livestock. The union puts the gross production value loss of wheat at approximately $499m and the cost of replacing a shortfall in forage at roughly $45m. NFU president Tom Bradshaw has said farmers now lack “breathing space” and are “increasingly exposed to geopolitical shocks, as well as repeated weather extremes, animal disease and global wars”. He believes action is needed now to ensure the future of British farming “and enable the next generation to keep producing the nation’s food”.
To manage the risk, Nelms is diversifying, planting oilseed rape again on about 350 acres (142 hectares) for the first time in 20 years. He says that the crop’s usual insecticide protection, neonicotinoid seed treatments, is now banned, leaving it exposed to cabbage stem flea beetle and to game birds that can “absolutely nibble, eat, and destroy a crop”. Growing it also means breaking a continuous wheat rotation that has kept a soil-borne disease called “Take-all”. Tax allowances would make investing in grain storage and diversified income worthwhile, he said, as well as government-backed bridging loans, modelled on COVID-era support, to survive a bad year without permanent damage.
It is the kind of relief the NFU is pressing the government to provide nationally. The union wants an interest-free “Keep Britain Growing” loan tied to drought losses, help covering the cost of disposing of livestock lost to bluetongue, faster planning permission for on-farm reservoirs, and clearer rules letting farmers access water as soon as levels allow, echoing Nelms’s case for storage on his farm. “Drought conditions will continue to worsen until we receive sustained rainfall across the country and we still all have a role to play in conserving precious water supplies,” according to Philip Duffy, the Environment Agency’s chief executive, in a statement shared by Defra. The Environment Agency has applied for a drought order to restrict abstraction from the River Severn, and 10 water companies, serving 30 million customers, now have restrictions in place. “A few days or even weeks of wetter weather cannot reverse the impacts of several months of exceptionally dry conditions,” added Duffy. Defra noted that the first meaningful rains since June have fallen but they have been patchy, so reservoirs and groundwater are still declining even as a handful of rivers see brief upticks in flow.
Despite the losses, Nelms is hopeful about farmers pulling together – sharing labour, machinery and market routes. He points to the Central Chiltern Farmer Cluster, where growers meet to talk through their problems and find solutions together. “We’re working together, not competing with each other,” he said. For a farm like Nelms’s, with no irrigation and no water in reserve, that patchiness is the problem. Soil parched from months without rain needs to absorb sustained rainfall before groundwater can even begin to recharge, let alone refill the reservoirs a future harvest might depend on. “Our climate has changed,” Water Minister Emma Hardy, who chairs the National Drought Group, said late last month, “and we will continue to take all action necessary.”
