by Farmers are dealing with record rainfall for at least a year, which means food produced in Britain has fallen sharply.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been flooded since last autumn due to 18 very wet months.
According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount recorded in any 18-month period in England.
Here, British farmers and growers tell us how they coped with the bad weather conditions and what the heavy rain means for their immediate future.
‘We will have a terrible harvest this year’
Our farm is mostly arable so we grow crops. The restrictions we face this year mean we will have a terrible harvest. We barely got any crops in the ground, I only managed to get 30 hectares [74 acres] out of my 170 hectares planted and we have 110 hectares of “fertile” land. That’s less than a third.
Generally you plant in the autumn but the difficulty we have had this year is that from mid-October until today it has been raining non-stop. Usually, you get rain but there will be pockets of dry weather for two or three weeks at a time to do the planting. That simply did not happen. For people who got crops in the ground before mid-October, that’s fine, but for me and many others if I plant too early I get this horrible weed called black grass that takes over my crop.
We are all caught out this year. I would imagine that there will still be thousands of unplanted hectares. The difference between this year and any other year is that there was no pocket of fine weather, that’s why it was a big problem.
Everyone is saying this is unusual. There have been bad years but this year was particularly bad. I wonder if climate change is causing curves here as we are moving to more and more extremes. When it came to planting last autumn, it was fine but the 2022 harvest was extremely dry, meaning they dried out too quickly and the yields were not great at all. Tom Allen-Stevens, 54, farmer and agricultural journalist, Faringdon, Oxfordshire
‘There is no sign of fields drying up soon’
The fields don’t have a chance to dry. We can’t use our tractor to cultivate, so we haven’t done any big plantings that are normally in the ground at the moment, like main crop potatoes and onions, summer brassicas and lettuces. They show no sign of drying up anytime soon.
We cannot use the tractor because it will destroy the structure of the soil, which we, as agro-ecological growers, are keen to preserve. Instead we were focusing on our political tunnels and using this space to the maximum advantage. But this is a tiny area in proportion to our fields and it is not possible to provide enough food to meet the needs of our box scheme.
It will have a big impact on our business, as customers are likely to cancel their subscription if the amount of vegetables they get each week is too little for too long. The “hungry 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 be much longer than usual. We also sometimes buy from a local organic wholesaler to supplement our boxes when we don’t have much of our own produce available; this will be much more expensive this year as so many large UK growers are affected.
In the long term, these unpredictable weather patterns are a sign of concern for climate change, and an affirmation of the need to completely restructure our food system to allow 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 farmLadies
‘We still have the vast majority of our cattle inside’
The main enterprise that has an impact from our perspective is the cereals, in terms of planting them and also the sheep. The percentage of lambs was lower, as a result [the percentage of ewes exposed to a ram per breeding period that have lambed].
It’s just hard work. You get up in the morning and you don’t see a forecast where there is improvement [weather] window. It’s very frustrating and we have to condense a lot of our work into fairly small windows at the moment. It’s much quicker, we’re working long hours in the evening or starting earlier in the morning.
At the moment, the vast majority of our cattle are still inside. We can’t put anything out because it’s so wet. The ewes are in lamb, so we have to keep them in until we get a window of dry weather so they get stronger before we send them out.
From the grain point of view, we could not yet sow a single seed of spring barley until Thursday which, here in Scotland, is very important for the whiskey trade, and for our straw bedding for livestock. Scott Maher, 50, mixed farmer partner, Angus, Scotland
‘If the rain stops, we don’t have to worry about drought – the seasons are so unpredictable now’
I work as a shepherd for someone who runs an extensive grass-based system. He keeps only ewes and there are probably around 1,000 ewe lambs spread over a large area in the Cotswolds.
The weather is a huge factor but so much more so are the general issues that affect people in everyday life. Farming is one of the only industries where we produce things that are sold wholesale but we have to pay retail prices for our inputs – fuel and feed, for example – which have all increased. That has always been an issue in the industry.
Last year, we had a drought during the peak grass growing times of the year, spring and early summer. Now we had to deal with floods. Some of the parks are completely underwater and basically inaccessible unless you’re willing to get very wet feet. We have had to spread the stock out as far as we can around the land area and keep it understocked according to industry standards to have that margin for adverse conditions.
If it stops raining, then we will worry about another drought. The weather seasons are so unpredictable now and that creates issues of parasites, flies, more insects that we wouldn’t normally see in this country that bring diseases like bluetongue. Elizabeth Johnson, shepherd and vet student, Gloucestershire
