The impact of poor harvests on the supply of milling wheat

The analysis suggests that volatility in production driven by extreme weather has had a net negative impact on UK wheat production this decade, against the twenty-year average. In the twenty-year period that this analysis looks at, the first three five-year periods all have a surplus against the twenty-year average, as good years for wheat production compensate for bad.  

However, in the period 2020-2024, poor harvests in 2020 and 2024 after extreme winter rainfall dragged down the average, as the good arable harvest in 2022 was not enough to offset these record breaking poor harvests – the worst and third worst on record respectively. These results are set out in Table 1.  

In order to illustrate the equivalent amount of bread that this ‘lost’ wheat production could have baked, we assumed that 41.6% of it would have been milled, leaving a total shortfall of 2,961,852 tonnes.  

This was multiplied by 1500 (the assumed number of loaves a tonne of wheat can produce) to generate a total of 4,442,778,210 loaves (4.4 billion). Based on a UK population of 69.23m people, this equates to 64 loaves per person. According to UK Flour Millers, 60.3 loaves of bread are purchased per person in the UK each year, meaning the shortfall in production between 2020-2024 equates to over a year’s supply of bread for everyone in the UK.