Perilous
Times and Climate Change
Lingering Drought, methodically destroying UK farm Crops
The lack of rain is destroying crops, bringing chaos to the
farming industry and threatening a steep rise in food prices.
Clive Aslet seeks a way out of the crisis
The price of failure: Tim Pratt, farm manager of Wantisden Hall
Farms in Suffolk, has been forced by the dry weather to hire extra
labour in order to spray struggling crops Photo: Archant
By Clive Aslet 7:01PM BST 17 May 2011
The Telegraph UK
Yesterday, on a train from London to the Midlands, I stared out of
the window on to a sorry scene of stunted crops and dusty land.
This is England in May, where spring ought to look at its
freshest. Instead, as any gardener knows, plants that have not
been irrigated have given up on life. Cereal crops have decided
that they had better reproduce quickly, as best they can under the
circumstances, in case they die. They’ve produced small seeds that
are too close together and won’t be sheltered from the sun by the
usual leaf.
In Hertfordshire, farmer Robert Law expects the yield from wheat
sown over winter to be down by 40 per cent. Cereals sown this
spring have been practically wiped out. “In an average year, we
would have 130ml of rainfall,” he sighs. “This year, we’ve had
7ml.” There isn’t the water to irrigate cereal crops, and it
wouldn’t be cost-efficient for him if there were, given the prices
the crops fetch.
Usually, only high-value crops such as sugar beet and vegetables
receive irrigation; this year, the sprayer booms have been turned
on. Even so, as Tim Pratt, farm manager of Wantisden Hall Farms in
Suffolk, explains, there is a cost: he has had to employ more
labour to do it. Fortunately, reserves of water in and under the
ground were topped up in winter. Even so, Richard Scott, chairman
of the Suffolk National Farmers Union, speaks of farmers enduring
some of the toughest conditions for decades.
“It’s the subject that preoccupies my every waking moment,”
laments Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association.
Organic farmers tend to plant more of the spring-sown crops which,
not having established their root systems, have been decimated.
“The dust is unbelievable. It’s a complete nightmare.”
The drought has come just as the nation has been putting the
memories of the big Christmas freeze behind it, although – to add
insult to injury – my hosts in Derbyshire experienced frost
earlier this week. The normal routine of the countryside has gone
out of the window, as it seems to have developed the habit of
doing in recent years.
Clive Newington runs a mixed farm in Sussex, and he speaks to me
from his tractor cab. “The drought is starting to bite,” he says.
“Wheat is coming into ear about 10 days too early, on straw that
is nine inches too short. The malting barley is looking so
stressed – there has been no growth.”
One of the consequences of stunted crops is a shortage of straw.
After last year’s baking July, some farmers simply ploughed their
under-performing crops back into the ground, rather than spend the
money on harvesting them. As a result, livestock farmers found
that there was a shortage of bedding, and had to pay a high price
for it. Straw could be even more difficult to buy this year.
Mr Newington expects to make bedding from the remains of the
stalks of beans and oil seed rape; usually, this “crop residue”
would be ploughed into the ground to improve fertility. Not doing
so will have a deleterious effect that might be noticed for two or
three years.
Mr Newington, though, is relatively fortunate. On his mixed farm,
he has the option of diverting some grain into animal feed. On a
pure dairy or beef unit, this isn’t possible. Farmers rely on the
sappy spring grass – richer in nutrients than grass in the summer
– to build up their animals after winter. They will want to
conserve some of it as hay or silage to use when the cattle are
back in their barns.
This year, the grass hasn’t performed. Meadows that should be
knee-high at this season barely tickle your ankles. Cattle are
being moved on to fields that had been earmarked for silage. And
the weather has made it difficult to spread fertiliser, which
needs rain to take it into the ground. The cost of fertiliser,
being energy-intensive to make, follows the oil price, so is now
at a high.
Pity the farmer who has fertilised his pastures in expectation of
rain to find the effort has been worthless. Whereas barley barons
have benefited from the boom in world wheat prices, livestock
farmers have had to pay more for their feed. Parched fields mean
they will have to buy in more feed than they’d like.
“I listen to the radio,” says the food campaigner Caroline
Cranbrook, based in Suffolk, “and they talk about sunny weekends,
as though the world were composed only of city dwellers. The
countryside is facing a crisis.” It is a crisis that will land,
inevitably, on the city dweller’s food plate, in the form of
inflated prices.
The Government should keep its eye on the supermarkets. In the
past, they have used rises in commodity costs to push up the cost
of food, even when the raw ingredient may only account for a small
percentage of the cost of the finished product. They should also
encourage consumers to overcome their finickiness about the
appearance of food. Potatoes are likely to be scabby – marked with
harmless spots – because of the dry weather; supermarkets will
reject them on aesthetic grounds, although they are perfectly good
to eat. The same goes for carrots, which might not grow evenly in
drought conditions.
Not everything is doing badly. As anyone who travelled around
Britain earlier in the spring will have noticed, this has been a
spectacular year for blossom. So expect apples, pears and plums to
do well. English strawberries have arrived early, and modern
techniques of horticulture mean that supplies should last.
Therese Coffey, MP for Suffolk Coastal, last week badgered the
Prime Minister about water in the House of Commons. “Our local
farmers are used to dry conditions but spray irrigation has
started much earlier than usual. The worry locally is that access
to aquifers could be limited and we need government agencies to be
flexible. The risk is that yields will fall and food prices
increase, so it is in all our interests to help our farmers.”
But this would only be a short-term fix. What is needed, given
that we are already living beyond our water means, is a long-term
strategy for drought. Britain is using more water for more
purposes – dishwashers where our parents might have used a sponge,
power showers where our grandparents might have heated a modest
cubic volume on the back boiler of their kitchen range.
Farmers are not blame-free in this respect. Since the 17th
century, field drainage has been one of the prerequisites of
efficient agriculture. Water is hurried from the land into rivers,
then shot out into the sea. With our generally wet climate, we’ve
asked engineers to get rid of water from roads and cities, and
they’ve taken us at our word. We squandered the rainwater that we
generally have in abundance. Less of it soaks back into the
aquifers; too little of it is stored.
Farmers should be encouraged to build reservoirs. At present,
almost every pond is regulated as though it were a reservoir
supplying Birmingham. We should reconnect with the wisdom of our
ancestors, for whom muck and compost were some of the only ways to
improve soil fertility.
On this one, the Prince of Wales is right: if more organic matter
were returned to the soil, it would retain more water. But there
is one respect in which he is wrong. One huge benefit to the world
of GM crops is their ability to survive droughts and flourish on
less water. Not only are such crops not licensed in this country,
but the mood is so hostile that research now takes places
overseas. That makes it less likely that new crops suitable for
British conditions will be developed. The farms minister Jim Paice
can do a rain dance if he likes. A better solution would be found
in GM.
Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of Country Life