Farmers have suffered record-breaking rainfall over the past year, meaning food production in Britain has fallen dramatically.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been flooded since last autumn due to the exceptionally wet eighteen months.
According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell between October 2022 and March 2024, the highest recorded in an 18-month period in England.
Here, British farmers and growers explain how they dealt with the harsh weather conditions and what the heavy rainfall means for their immediate future.
‘We’re going to have a terrible harvest this year’
Our farm is mainly arable, so it is crops that we grow. The restrictions we face this year mean we will have a terrible harvest. We hardly have any crops in the ground, I was only able to get 30 hectares [74 acres] of my 170 hectares are planted and we have 110 hectares of “buildable” land. That’s less than a third.
Generally you plant in the fall, but the problem we’ve had this year is that from mid-October until now there has been basically non-stop rain. Most of the time you will get rain, but there will be periods of dry weather for planting for two or three weeks. That simply didn’t happen. For people who get 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 blackgrass that takes over my crop.
We all got caught this year. I imagine there will still be thousands of unplanted hectares. The difference between this year and all the others is that there hasn’t been any nice weather, which is why it’s been such a big deal.
Everyone says this is extraordinary. There have been bad years, but this year was particularly bad. It makes you wonder if it’s climate change that’s causing problems here as we become more and more extreme. As far as planting crops last fall, it was fine, but the 2022 crop was incredibly dry, meaning they dried up too quickly and yields weren’t great at all. Tom Allen-Stevens, 54, farmer and agricultural journalist, Faringdon, Oxfordshire
‘There are no signs that the fields will dry out anytime soon’
The fields simply don’t get a chance to dry out. We can’t use our tractor for cultivation, so we haven’t done any of the large plantings that are usually in the ground now, such as main crop potatoes and onions, summer brassicas and salads. There are no signs of them drying out quickly.
We cannot use the tractor because it will destroy the soil structure, which as agroecological growers we would like to preserve. Instead, we focused on our polytunnels and made the most of this space. However, this is a small area in relation to our fields and cannot accommodate enough food to meet the needs of our box program.
It will have a huge impact on our business as customers are likely to cancel their subscription if the amount of vegetables they receive each week is too long and too small. 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] will take much longer than normal. We also sometimes purchase from a local organic wholesaler to supplement our boxes if we do not have many of our own products available; this will be much more expensive this year as so many major UK growers are affected.
In the longer term, these unpredictable weather patterns are a worrying indicator of climate change and confirmation of the need to completely restructure our food system to enable truly sustainable production that meets the needs of local communities and is accessible to all. Rhian Williams, 31, vegetable grower on a community supported agricultural farmLeeds
‘We still have the vast majority of our livestock’
The main business affected from our perspective is the grains, in terms of planting them, and also the sheep. The lamb percentage was therefore lower [the percentage of ewes exposed to a ram per breeding period that have lambed].
It’s just been hard work. You get up in the morning and you don’t see a prediction where there is a better one [weather] window. It’s quite frustrating and we currently have to condense a lot of our work into quite small windows. It is much more hurried, we work longer hours into the evenings or start earlier in the morning.
We currently still have the vast majority of our livestock. We just can’t put anything out because it’s so wet. The sheep are lambing so we need to keep them indoors until we get a dry weather window so they get stronger before we put them out.
On the grain side, until Thursday we were unable to sow a single seed for spring barley, which is very important here in Scotland for the whiskey trade, but also for our livestock bedding. Scott Maher, 50, mixed farming partner, Angus, Scotland
‘If the rain stops, we have to worry about drought – the seasons are so unpredictable now’
I work as a shepherd for someone who manages an extensive grass system. He farms exclusively sheep and probably has around 1,000 lambing ewes spread over a large area in the Cotswolds.
Weather is a huge factor, but a lot of it is compounded by common issues that people face in everyday life. Agriculture is one of the few industries where we produce things that are sold wholesale, but we have to pay retail prices for our inputs – fuel and feed, for example – all of which have increased. That has always been a problem in the sector.
Last year we experienced drought during the peak grass growth times of the year, spring and early summer. Now we have had floods. Some fields are completely submerged and basically inaccessible unless you are prepared to get your feet very wet. We had to spread the inventory as far as we could over the land area and keep the inventory below industry standards so that we had room for bad conditions.
If it does stop raining, we worry whether another drought will occur. The weather seasons are so unpredictable now and that also brings with it problems of parasites, flies and more insects that we wouldn’t normally see in this country and that cause diseases like bluetongue. Elizabeth Johnson, herding and veterinary student, Gloucestershire