‘Too wet then, too dry now’ – Farmers struggle with increasingly unpredictable weather

“Weather and climate related risks are becoming unsustainable for annual cropping. We’ve gone from far too wet across much of England in the autumn, to far too dry now. We got 10mm of rain in April, but otherwise we’ve had no rain for more than two months and a heatwave this week.

“If we don’t get some rain soon, we’ll be in a very difficult situation in another week. As a business, we just can’t plan for this sort of volatility, particularly following a shocking harvest last year.”

The long-range forecast for the first half of May suggests continued dry weather in the south of England through to the middle of the month [5]. The worries about this year’s crops follow on from a harvest in England last year that was the second worst on record [6], following a winter in 2023/24 of extreme rainfall, made worse by climate change [7]. These concerns have been compounded by funding uncertainty over the future of Defra’s green farm reforms, following the abrupt closure of the flagship Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme in March [8].

Tom Edmondson [9], a mixed farmer from Milton Keynes said, “Some farmers are really struggling around us with this very dry spring and some spring crops have completely failed. Our nature-friendly farming, focusing on cover crops, grazing, reducing tilling and building up organic matter in the soil over a period of years, is what is making the difference for us because it has built up our resilience.

“It's the unpredictability of it all that is really challenging. You just don't know what the weather is going to do from year to year. Building more resilience into the system is vital to be able to cope with these challenges. We need the government to re-open the SFI and fund it properly if more farmers are to be able to build their resilience as climate change takes hold.”
 
The Climate Change Committee this week reported that the country was not prepared for climate impacts [10], with progress on food security and nature rated as either insufficient or limited.
 
Tom Lancaster, land, food and farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said, “Climate change is having a devastating impact on UK farming and our collective food security. Last year’s harvest was one of the worst on record after 18 months of relentless rain, following a drought and extreme heat in 2022 that left crops baked into the ground. For farmers, it’s becoming increasingly hard to farm given increasingly severe impacts we are now seeing. 
 
"The government’s response to this scale of risk is clearly not aligned to the jeopardy it poses. And yet we have solutions available now, including the green farming schemes that were unexpectedly pulled last month. Investing in these schemes at the spending review in June will be needed to build the resilience of UK food production, and will be a key test of whether the government has taken the criticism in this report on board. Until we reach net zero emissions and stop adding planet warming emissions to the atmosphere, these risks simply become more and more unmanageable.”