Farmers have been facing record rainfall for at least the past year, meaning food produced in Britain has fallen dramatically.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been flooded since last autumn due to exceptionally rainy months for 18 months.
According to the Met Office, 1,695.9 mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024; This is the highest amount record for any 18-month period in the UK.
Here, British farmers and growers tell us how they are coping with the harsh weather and what heavy rains mean for their immediate future.
‘We will have a terrible harvest this year’
Since our farm is mostly suitable for agriculture, these are the products we grow. The restrictions we face this year mean we will have a terrible harvest. There is almost no crop on the land, I only managed to get 30 hectares. [74 acres] I have 170 hectares of cultivated land and we have 110 hectares of “arable” land. That’s less than a third.
Usually you plant in the fall, but the challenge we had this year was that it had been raining non-stop since mid-October. It usually rains, but there will be two or three weeks of dry weather to do the planting. This definitely did not happen. For people who crop before mid-October this is not a problem, but for me and many others if I plant too early I get this nasty weed called black grass and it takes over my crop.
We all got caught this year. I estimate that there will still be thousands of hectares left uncultivated. What’s different about this year than any other is that we haven’t had any good weather, which is why it’s been such a big problem.
Everyone says this is extraordinary. There have been bad years, but this year was especially bad. You wonder if climate change is creating a tipping point here as we move towards more and more extremes. Last fall was good when it came to crop planting, but the 2022 harvest was incredibly dry, meaning they dried out very quickly and yields weren’t good at all. Tom Allen-Stevens, 54, farmer and agricultural journalist. Faringdon, Oxfordshire
‘There is no sign that the fields will dry out anytime soon’
The fields have no chance of drying out. We can’t use our tractor for planting, so so far we haven’t done any of the large plantings usually found in the ground, such as main crop potatoes and onions, summer brassicas and lettuces. There’s no sign of them drying out any time soon.
We cannot use the tractor because it would destroy the soil structure, which we as agroecological growers are determined to preserve. Instead we focus on our polytunnels and use this space to maximum benefit. However, in proportion to our fields, this is a very small area and cannot accommodate enough food to meet the needs of our box setup.
This will have a huge impact on our business because customers will likely cancel their subscriptions if the amount of vegetables they get each week is too little for too long. “Hunger gap” [a few weeks, usually falling between April and early June, when winter crops have ended but the new season’s plantings are yet to be harvested] It will take much longer than normal. We also sometimes buy from a local organic wholesaler to fill our boxes when we don’t have much of our own produce; It will be much more expensive this year as many large growers in the UK are affected.
In the long term, these unpredictable weather patterns are a worrying indicator of climate change and confirmation that we must completely restructure our food system to ensure truly sustainable production that meets the needs of local communities and is accessible to all. Rhian Williams, 31, vegetable grower at a community-supported agriculture farmLeeds
‘The vast majority of our cattle are still inside’
The main business it affects from our perspective is grain in terms of cultivation and also sheep. As a result the lambing percentage was lower [the percentage of ewes exposed to a ram per breeding period that have lambed].
It was a very difficult job. You wake up in the morning and you don’t see a better weather forecast. [weather] window. This is quite annoying and we currently have to concentrate most of our work on quite small windows. We are much more in a hurry, working long hours into the evening or starting early in the morning.
Currently the majority of our cattle are still indoors. We can’t put out anything because the weather is so wet. The ewes are lambing so we have to keep them in until we get a window of dry weather so they can get stronger before taking them out.
On the grain side, we could not sow a single seed for spring barley until Thursday; This is hugely important in Scotland, both for the whiskey trade and for our livestock hay bed. Scott Maher, 50, mixed farmer partner, Angus, Scotland
‘If the rain stops we’ll have to worry about drought; ‘Seasons are so unpredictable now’
I work as a shepherd for someone who runs an extensive herb-based system. He keeps only sheep and probably has around 1,000 lambing ewes spread over a wide area in the Cotswolds.
Weather is a huge factor, but most of it is compounded by general issues that affect people in daily life. Farming is one of the few industries where we produce products that are sold wholesale, but we are forced to pay increasing retail prices for our inputs (e.g. fuel and feed). This has always been a problem in the industry.
Last year we experienced drought conditions in the spring and early summer when grass planting was at its peak. Now we had to deal with floods. Some areas are completely underwater and basically inaccessible unless you’re prepared to get your feet very wet. To maintain margin against harsh conditions we had to spread stock as far as possible around the land area and maintain insufficient stock by industry standards.
We are worried about whether there will be a drought again if the rain stops. Weather seasons are now so unpredictable that this also brings with it more pest problems that cause diseases such as parasites, flies and bluetongue that we wouldn’t normally see in this country. Elizabeth Johnson, shepherd and veterinary student, gloucestershire