England has suffered its second-worst harvests on the official record as the result of its cold, wet, miserable summer.
The wheat harvest is down 21 million tonnes on last year, or 21 per cent on last year, whilst barley was down 26 per cent and oilseed rape down 32 per cent, according to an analysis provided by the inestimable Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
Listen to this story at James Meadway’s podcast, Macrodose.
Worst-hit of all was England’s burgeoning wine industry, where, depending on the region, grape harvest were down between two-thirds and three-quarters on last year’s crop.
Unpredictability
This was more than just bad weather. Attribution studies is a new field of research that uses scientific modelling to say with much greater precision if, and by how much, some specific weather events can be attributed to climate change.
For the UK over 2023 and 2024, scientists at World Weather Atrribution estimate that storm rainfall was made 20 per cent worse by climate change, and the total volume of rain was made four times more likely by climate change. So with a high degree of certainty we can say the grim English summer of 2024 was due to climate change, rather than bad luck alone.
Those poor harvests have real consequences. Farmers themselves are the first to lose out – ECIU estimates that, just on the five crops they looked at, farming incomes across England will be down £600m as a result of poor harvests.
With many smaller farmers already on a knife-edge, facing rising costs and growing unpredictability in the weather, this could be enough to tip them into bankruptcy.
Consumed
In 2022, a third of British farms made no money, and agricultural insolvencies have soared in the last couple of years. There is growing support for the idea of a Basic Income for farmers, with the BI4Farmers campaign launched in April.
This would guarantee a level of income for farmers, smoothing out the increasingly dramatic swings in their farm earnings and enabling them to carry on operating.
This matters, because on the other side of the deal we all need to food to eat. And that’s where Britain’s model for its food system is coming under increasing strain.
For decades, the country has relied on meeting its food needs through imports, with the total amount of food consumed here that is also produced here falling from about 80 per cent in the early 1980s under 60 per cent in 2023.
Drought
There were solid arguments for importing food from elsewhere: the expansion in variety in what we eat has been dramatic, with one-time exotic luxuries like olive oil moving close to staples – retail sales of olive oil overtook all other cooking oils as far back as 2004.
