While I love to break farming stereotypes, here’s one that stands up: farmers always talk about the weather. But why? To answer that, let me take you back to a recent fateful summer on our farm.
I clearly recall an afternoon in July 2020 when with some trepidation I went to look around our fields of rapeseed. You may also know this merry crop—covered in yellow flowers throughout April—as “oilseed rape,” or possibly “canola.” Rapeseed is a “brassica”—the same family as mustard—and I had nurtured these five-foot-tall plants from their tiny mustard-sized seeds through one of the wettest winters in living memory. They had staved off attacks from pigeons and flea beetles and survived the driest May on record.
However, over the first weekend of July, forecasted high winds came, and gusts of up to 40mph buffeted the plants. At any other time of year this wouldn’t be an issue as this crop—sown the previous August—can tolerate all manner of extreme weather. But as the plant naturally dies off in June and July, the pods containing the seeds that we hope to harvest become brittle and prone to breaking open, spilling their valuable content.
That summer, I watched helplessly as the seed I’d toiled to produce for over 12 months fell to the ground, and the reasonable profit that the crop had been set to bring in turned instantly to loss. The crop was decimated (and I employ “decimated” in its proper, historic sense of “to reduce by one tenth”) as so many of the precious black seeds were now on the floor. Through the year, farmers invest between £600 and £1,000 per hectare in a growing crop of rapeseed, which is then sold to produce environmentally friendly biofuels, cooking oils and industrial lubricant. With a sale price at the time of around £350 per tonne, I had to harvest over two and a half tonnes per hectare just to break even. But little did I know that the ferocious wind was to be the least of my worries; much worse was to follow.
Within just a few days, another storm brought rain and popcorn-sized hailstones. It was an isolated storm that affected our neighbours to the north and south, but not to the east and west. I watched it from my house, powerless. My wife wondered aloud if the hail would dent her car, but with the damage in just one field nearing £10,000, it would have been cheaper to pay for a new car. This 10-minute meteorological onslaught affected all our crops; it was a loss of income for the farm on a scale that I’d never seen before, and that summer it was followed by storms Ellen, Francis and Alex, which put the loss well into six figures.
While birth and death, growth, gain and loss are all part of nature and farming, to lose the fruits of 12 months’ labour is devastating. I won’t forget that summer. Just a few years into my farming journey, I wake up every day and, in the pre-dawn promise of daylight, check the weather forecast with a sense of unease.
As chairman of the East of England Farming Conference, I’m often asked about the impact of Brexit and the pandemic on UK farms. Both have undoubtedly brought seismic shifts to the business landscape, but the weather remains my biggest concern. You won’t meet many climate change-denying farmers. Mother Nature is raising her game and we are on the front line. Spring 2020 was the sunniest since records began, and the nation’s refrain during that first Covid-19 lockdown was “at least it’s not raining.” That is true of course; it wasn’t. It wasn’t raining at all. Local weather stations recorded zero millimetres of rain during much of that spring, and crops stalled, wilted and, in many cases, died. Farmers were reclassified from “unskilled labour” to “key workers,” meaning we had the pleasure of continuing to work during that period. I must say, we were immensely grateful to escape martial confinement, but the relentless drought meant that, soil moisture was evaporating—and with it our profits.
In a recent survey, three in four farmers said extreme weather events had cost their businesses more than £50,000, and our farm would certainly be among that number. It was reported last year that the weather, combined with the impacts of Covid and Brexit, slashed farm incomes by 20 per cent. The previous few years have seen records for temperatures and drought. I’ve realised that the impacts here on the farm cut beyond the pocket; it’s a flesh wound of labour squandered and efforts rendered fruitless. This is why the stereotype of farmers obsessing over the weather is true, and the roots of our societal small talk about whether or not to carry a furled umbrella are deeply embedded in our nation’s ties to the land.
