What the Drought Actually Cost

The 2024–25 farming year was planned to make about thirty-seven thousand pounds. It lost roughly five thousand. The entire difference was weather.

Wheat came in about thirty per cent down. Barley about forty per cent down. Durum wheat, which was expected at six tonnes a hectare, came in under two in places. On Cotswold brash — fifteen to forty-five centimetres of stony soil over limestone — there is almost no water-holding capacity, so when it stops raining in April the crop simply stops.

The year before, it did not stop raining, and the farm made under fifteen thousand pounds. Too wet, then too dry. That is not bad luck. That is arable farming, and it is precisely why agri-environment scheme income — which arrives regardless of rainfall and now accounts for around thirty per cent of average English farm business income — matters more than any agronomic decision made all year.