Less wheat in a “catastrophic year” on farms

Farmers are counting the price of the lengthy, moist winter as they begin to usher in file low harvests of grain.

The quantity of wheat planted has fallen by almost a tenth, and two thirds of British farmers say they’ve misplaced cash.

Throughout winter and spring many fields have been waterlogged, crops that had been sown have been misplaced and farmers couldn’t get onto fields to sow something.

Mike Wilkins, an arable farmer in Wiltshire, misplaced about half his wheat. He stated: “We have lost thousands and thousands of pounds this year, it has been catastrophic.”

When I first met Mike Wilkins in May, he had a lake on his farm.

High on the Marlborough Downs, you can see for miles round.

But the place wheat ought to have stood, there have been swans and geese paddling round.

Other fields have been so moist the wheat sown had failed, rotting within the floor.

“If we don’t make a loss it will be a miracle,” he advised me on the time.

Since then, the solar has come out and what wheat they might sow now appears to be like OK.

“Don’t be fooled,” he says with a rueful smile. “It’s thin and full of weeds we couldn’t spray because the ground was so wet we couldn’t get a tractor on.”

The ears are golden now, and Mike picks a handful of grains to check for moisture.

He grinds them in a handheld machine, which is able to inform him how moist the wheat nonetheless is.

“I need 15% max,” he exhibits me.

“But look – that’s still 19%, way too high.”

Just then, it begins to drizzle once more.

“We need a few good solid sunny days to dry this, before we can cut it,” he tells me, wanting on the darkish clouds overhead.

It is anxious, demanding work, however that is truly a standard West Country harvest routine.

August is commonly moist, harvest all the time a tough juggle.

Farmers await the right climate window, then crank up the mix, regardless of the day or the hour, to get the harvest residence.

But this 12 months is completely different. Even after they can get harvesting, a lot of the wheat by no means bought sown within the first place.

On Mike’s farm, in addition to the lake that they had a number of fields so waterlogged they missed the second to plant wheat. Later, as they dried out, he bought some beans wherein will go for cattle feed.

“Financially they will make hundreds and hundreds of pounds less per hectare,” he explains.

“This field is over 30 hectares, so that’s thousands of pounds less profit.

“And we have 200 hectares more like this. It’s been a really messy year.”

Mr Wilkins, and his sister and fogeys who farm right here, are removed from alone.

Official surveys from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board lately discovered the quantity of wheat planted is 9% down, the bottom for 20 years. Oilseed Rape is 20% down.

At the National Farmers’ Union, they’ve reported their lowest ever farm confidence index. Some 65% of farmers say their incomes are down. 82% cited excessive climate as their largest problem.

NFU President Tom Bradshaw stated the outcomes “paint a really stark picture”.

“Confidence has collapsed after months of devastating flooding, unsustainably high production costs and low market returns, and against a backdrop of reduced farm support as we transition to a new Domestic Agriculture Policy and associated farm support,” he says.

It was not just a wet winter, or a wet spring. Farmers had 18 months of rain, from September 2023 to May 2024 more rain fell than at any time since records began in 1836.

And experts agree this is “the new normal”.

“We will get more extremes of weather,” says Prof Nicola Cannon, of Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural University.

“More wet winters, more dry summers, more extremes. And our soils are unable to cope, because of the way we have farmed them in the past.”

To see how farmers are now working differently, I revisit another farm that I last saw under water.

Debbie Wilkins’ farm had literally become a boating lake, her children kayaked on several miles of clear water which reached to the River Severn.

But she was philosophical about the hundreds of acres of pasture sitting under two metres of flood waters.

“They are just doing their job,” she told me in January.

“It takes the strain off the river and protects the properties under us.”

Now, the grasses have come again. She exhibits me historic wild grasses and flowers which have face up to lengthy chilly months beneath water.

“It’s green again, after six months of flooding,” she smiles.

But the size of the flood has value her cash. Normally, the grass would bounce again within the spring and they might reduce 600 bales of hay from these meadows.

“We still haven’t taken a hay cut this year,” she says. “I think we’ll do well to get 150 bales.”

Ms Wilkins is a part of a brand new motion known as “Nature Friendly Farming”. The concept is to work with nature, utilizing as few pesticides and pesticides as potential and “letting nature do the science”.

She exhibits me what she means in one other area hit by the floods.

Like a whole lot throughout the West Country, this area was waterlogged. It was meant for maize, to feed her cows. But with no likelihood to get a tractor on within the spring, she missed that planting.

Instead, as soon as it had dried out, she “emptied the shed”, planting a random mixture of crops.

Now it’s a rainbow of mustard, linseed, buckwheat, you title it.

“We’re trying to heal the soil”, Ms Wilkins explains.

“When there are plants growing in it, that will make the soil and the microbes function better when it’s either very wet or very dry, and we’ll need to add less chemicals to it.”

Prof Cannon says we want extra of this.

“We need to build resilience in our soil, so it can rebound after extreme drought or rainfall.

“We’ve bought to be ready for more difficult circumstances, be it floods or droughts. And we should situation our soil to work for us because the local weather adjustments.”