Six months ago, after Britain’s driest February in 30 years, Andrew Blenkiron feared a lack of rain would threaten crops on the farm he manages in Suffolk, eastern England. Now he has the opposite problem.
Some 2,000 acres of wheat and barley on the 7,000-acre Euston Estate have been compromised by the wet weather, with the Met Office, the national weather service, finding this July was the UK’s sixth-wettest on record.
“The day we got the combine harvester out, it started to rain,” said Blenkiron.
This year has so far been a period of extremes: February was the driest second month of the year since 1993, while June was the hottest since records began in 1853. Unseasonably heavy rain followed throughout July and the first week of August.
Weather patterns have always dictated the success of a harvest. But this year, as wheat sits soaked in store or untouched in the fields, farmers say it is becoming more difficult to mitigate the risks that an increasingly volatile climate poses to UK food security.
As of August 8, only 5 per cent of cereal growing in Great Britain had been harvested, far below the five-year average of 36 per cent by that stage in the season, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, an advisory body to farmers.
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