Add now to the list of countries with Imminent
Crop Failure Due to Drought the
Yesterday, on a train from
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
“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
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
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
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.
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
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.