The wettest September on record in some parts of England has left growers bracing for another difficult winter.
Heavy rain last month has left a number of farms under water, particularly in the home counties, warned British Growers Association CEO Jack Ward.
Many farms had suspended harvest and planting work, and were now facing a “nightmare” scenario with months of bad weather still to come, Ward said, with the situation adding to existing concerns around the resilience of the farming sector and the UK’s food security.
The situation is “quite worrying for anybody with potatoes in the ground, carrots in the ground, and anybody that needs to get about on the land”, Ward warned.
“After a very wet winter last year and a very wet spring, to then run into another very wet autumn is concerning, and it just comes back to this overall thing of how dependent we are on the weather for food supply,” he said.
The wet weather also had a direct impact on the quality of crop, he explained, and made it more difficult for growers to get to a standard expected in retail.
These types of crop did not benefit from “this amount of rain on them at this stage”, Ward added. “We’re worried about getting crops out of the ground, the cereal industry is worried about trying to get them back into the ground and that’s off the back of what has been a pretty difficult year.”
The NFU told The Grocer that issues were particularly being felt in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.
Farmers were concerned about the “ability to drill the next lot of crops in case they get washed away like last year”, and many were holding off planting until spring next year, the union added.
These concerns were echoed by Bedfordshire arable farmer Freya Morgan, who said that “nobody can get on the ground at the moment to do anything”, which means “we’re not going to get through the workloads that we do normally”.
She said normally at this point in the year her farm had planted 70% of autumn cereals but this year none had been planted so far due to the rain.
The industry is almost on its knees at the moment, anyway, and when we get these wet weather periods it just makes it even worse,” said Morgan.
She explained winter barley was likely to be delayed until spring planting which means that seed will have to be kept in storage for a longer period and impact cash flow for her business.
This comes as input costs up gone up 44% since 2019 across farming businesses and “the price of grain doesn’t reflect that at all”.
“Morale is at an all-time low at the moment,” she added.
Other crop growers are also looking ahead to consider what the impact could be. According to Richard Wilson, UK agriculture manager at Birds Eye, wet weather ”puts more pressure on operational capacity and businesses must make sure they have the agility to handles the spikes we get now to continue to deliver quality produce to consumers”.
Root vegetables have seen significant price rises over the last year, according to The Grocer’s analysis of Assosia’s Key Value Items Tracker. Carrots have risen by 34% on average since last year.
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