London, United Kingdom \u2013 In a wheat field near High Wycombe in the rolling English countryside, Alex Nelms watched the harvest on his farm die in a matter of days.<\/p>\n
His crop had looked strong until the first heatwave came in May, when temperatures surpassed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) just as his milling wheat entered its grain-fill phase, the critical weeks when the plant fattens its kernels.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt just killed everything stone dead,\u201d he told Al Jazeera. \u201cEverything was finished really early, and when we were sort of full of optimism and hope, it was scuppered almost overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nelms farms just over 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of arable land in south Buckinghamshire, on a business his grandparents founded in 1955. His uncle, who has worked the farm for more than 40 years, has just suffered the worst harvest of his career.<\/p>\n
Last month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said almost three-quarters of England, 71.3 percent, remained in drought. Rainfall in August reached just 34 percent of what would normally be expected by that point in the month, Defra said, and reservoir levels were 18.2 percentage points below where they should be for the time of year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re totally reliant on Mother Nature,\u201d Nelms said, and nature did not deliver this year.<\/p>\n
After a historically dry spring and a run of summer heatwaves, the farm is down roughly 1,000 tonnes on its average harvest, a shortfall of some $270,000 in revenue.<\/p>\n
The farm, tucked in the Chiltern Hills, a steep, long ridge of white limestone rock, has no irrigation and never will.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat has serious knock-on effects on our cash flow,\u201d he said. A third consecutive difficult year would mean hard conversations with his bank and landlord, and farming to minimise risk rather than maximise output, \u201cconsequently, probably producing less food\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018Financial crisis point\u2019<\/p>\n
The National Farmers\u2019 Union (NFU) says farmers are at a \u201cfinancial crisis point\u201d after the worst drought in 50 years, with historically low harvests, stunted grass growth, rising fuel and fertiliser costs, and a severe outbreak of bluetongue disease in livestock.<\/p>\n
The union puts the gross production value loss of wheat at approximately $499m and the cost of replacing a shortfall in forage at roughly $45m.<\/p>\n
NFU president Tom Bradshaw has said farmers now lack \u201cbreathing space\u201d and are \u201cincreasingly exposed to geopolitical shocks, as well as repeated weather extremes, animal disease and global wars\u201d.<\/p>\n
He believes action is needed now to ensure the future of British farming \u201cand enable the next generation to keep producing the nation\u2019s food\u201d.<\/p>\n
To manage the risk, Nelms is diversifying, planting oilseed rape again on about 350 acres (142 hectares) for the first time in 20 years. He says that the crop\u2019s usual insecticide protection, neonicotinoid seed treatments, is now banned, leaving it exposed to cabbage stem flea beetle and to game birds that can \u201cabsolutely nibble, eat, and destroy a crop\u201d.<\/p>\n
Growing it also means breaking a continuous wheat rotation that has kept a soil-borne disease called \u201cTake-all\u201d.<\/p>\n
Tax allowances would make investing in grain storage and diversified income worthwhile, he said, as well as government-backed bridging loans, modelled on COVID-era support, to survive a bad year without permanent damage.<\/p>\n
It is the kind of relief the NFU is pressing the government to provide nationally.<\/p>\n
The union wants an interest-free \u201cKeep Britain Growing\u201d loan tied to drought losses, help covering the cost of disposing of livestock lost to bluetongue, faster planning permission for on-farm reservoirs, and clearer rules letting farmers access water as soon as levels allow, echoing Nelms\u2019s case for storage on his farm.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrought conditions will continue to worsen until we receive sustained rainfall across the country and we still all have a role to play in conserving precious water supplies,\u201d according to Philip Duffy, the Environment Agency\u2019s chief executive, in a statement shared by Defra.<\/p>\n
The Environment Agency has applied for a drought order to restrict abstraction from the River Severn, and 10 water companies, serving 30 million customers, now have restrictions in place.<\/p>\n
\u201cA few days or even weeks of wetter weather cannot reverse the impacts of several months of exceptionally dry conditions,\u201d added Duffy.<\/p>\n
Defra noted that the first meaningful rains since June have fallen but they have been patchy, so reservoirs and groundwater are still declining even as a handful of rivers see brief upticks in flow.<\/p>\n
Despite the losses, Nelms is hopeful about farmers pulling together \u2013 sharing labour, machinery and market routes. He points to the Central Chiltern Farmer Cluster, where growers meet to talk through their problems and find solutions together.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working together, not competing with each other,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For a farm like Nelms\u2019s, with no irrigation and no water in reserve, that patchiness is the problem. Soil parched from months without rain needs to absorb sustained rainfall before groundwater can even begin to recharge, let alone refill the reservoirs a future harvest might depend on.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur climate has changed,\u201d Water Minister Emma Hardy, who chairs the National Drought Group, said late last month, \u201cand we will continue to take all action necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London, United Kingdom \u2013 In a wheat field near High Wycombe in the rolling English countryside, Alex Nelms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[2411,1397,591,1991,50,90,56,54,55,1068],"class_list":["post-765100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-business-and-economy","tag-environment","tag-europe","tag-food","tag-news","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}