A country of green fields, turning brown
In late August 2025, beneath a sky bleached pale by another record-breaking summer, a wheat field in Lincolnshire stood still. The wind raised dust rather than grain. Soil crumbled between the fingers like stale cake. What should have been a tall, rustling crop had stalled at half its height, and the combine harvesters waiting on the headland were about to tally some of the worst yields in a generation.
Scenes like this have played out across the country. According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), arable farmers have faced an estimated £800 million loss this season, with catastrophic declines in staple crops: oilseed rape down more than 35 percent, oats down more than 20 percent, and milling wheat falling by nearly 20 percent against long-term averages. England’s 2025 harvest is now confirmed as the second-worst since detailed records began.
Behind these numbers lies a deeper story about climate pressures that no longer arrive as shocks but as a steady drumbeat.
A crisis years in the making
Farmers are clear: this is not a single bad year. Three of the five worst harvests ever recorded in the UK have occurred within the last five years. Low rainfall, unseasonal heat, water restrictions and soil degradation are combining to produce conditions that the Met Office has repeatedly warned will become more frequent.
Professor Richard Allan, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, describes the 2025 summer as part of a trend rather than an anomaly. “We are seeing hotter, drier summers forming a pattern that aligns with long-term projections for the UK. Droughts that were once considered extreme are now well within the expected range of conditions for mid-century Britain.”
Met Office data supports this. The spring and summer of 2025 were the hottest on record, with parts of eastern England receiving less than half of the typical seasonal rainfall. Hosepipe bans persisted deep into the harvest window. This combination of heat stress and water scarcity reduced grain fill, stunted growth, and accelerated soil moisture loss.
Farmers describe the conditions more bluntly. “We were growing crops in a kiln,” says James Haywood, an arable farmer in Cambridgeshire. “By June, the topsoil was gone to dust. We irrigated cereals for the first time in my lifetime, which is something none of us ever thought we would do.”
Irrigating cereal crops is often uneconomical and rarely necessary in Britain’s temperate climate. Its arrival as a last resort is a strong signal that farming assumptions built on predictable seasons may no longer hold.
The science: a dry future colliding with a wet winter problem
Climate change is reshaping Britain’s hydrological cycle. Summers are drying. Winters are intensifying. Soil is caught between the two.
DEFRA’s Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation report notes that England is on track to face a water supply shortfall of between 4,000 and 5,000 million litres per day by 2050 without urgent action. At the same time, heavier winter downpours are leading to runoff rather than groundwater recharge, washing away nutrients and eroding already fragile soils.
When water arrives too quickly, it leaves just as fast. When it arrives too slowly, crops cannot survive. This is the water-soil-climate nexus, and it is now shaping every decision on the farm.
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report highlights this exact challenge globally, but here in Britain, the impacts are unfolding faster than many anticipated. The increasing frequency of consecutive dry years is reducing soil moisture resilience, while degraded soils fail to act as natural reservoirs.
Healthy soils typically contain between 3 and 6 percent organic matter. Many British arable soils are below 2 percent, according to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. This means they store far less water, lose carbon rapidly, and collapse into crust or dust in extreme heat.
When the soil holds, the farm holds
The 2025 drought effectively became an unplanned nationwide experiment comparing farming systems.
Farms that had invested in regenerative and soil-building practices came out battered but standing. Yields dropped, but not catastrophically. Across Norfolk and Shropshire, growers using no-till systems, cover crops, diverse rotations and organic amendments consistently reported stronger plant rooting and slower soil drying.
“Healthy soil behaves like a sponge,” explains Dr. Anne Bhogal, soil scientist at ADAS. “It can hold up to twenty times its weight in water. In drought years, this is the difference between a crop that fails at flowering and one that holds on long enough to fill grain.”
Farmers who had focused on building soil organic matter saw their fields stay greener for longer compared to neighbouring farms on compacted or eroded land.
One such farmer, Alistair Morton from Yorkshire, describes it simply: “We still took a hit, but the crop survived. Ten years ago, before we changed how we worked the soil, it would have died outright.”
This pattern has now been widely observed. Healthy soil does not prevent climate-driven losses altogether, but it blunts them. It is a resilience strategy that works at the level of roots, microbes, and moisture, far below the headlines.
Water: the invisible limit on British agriculture
The farming crisis is also a water crisis.
Irrigation, once a tool used primarily for potatoes, fruit and vegetables, is increasingly being applied to cereals and oilseed crops. But Britain’s surface and groundwater resources are already under stress, particularly in the South East. The Environment Agency has warned that some catchments may soon be unable to grant additional abstraction licences.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has repeatedly warned that without a coherent national water strategy, the UK will find itself unable to adapt. NFU Deputy President David Exwood stated earlier this year: “Water is our single most important climate resilience tool. We cannot keep treating it as an afterthought.”
Several adaptation pathways are emerging:
• On-farm water storage, including small reservoirs and rain-fed lagoons.
• Smarter abstraction, based on real-time river flow monitoring.
• Reuse of treated wastewater, a practice common internationally but still limited in the UK.
• Greater catchment-scale coordination, encouraged through the Environmental Land Management schemes.
But these require planning horizons longer than a single growing season, and investment levels that are difficult for many farmers already operating on thin margins.
The human impact: a year of impossible sums
Behind every yield number is a household doing the maths.
One Gloucestershire farmer reported expecting around £20,000 from a wheat block that, in the end, delivered a £3,000 loss after accounting for fuel, fertiliser, machinery and labour. Others reported yields cut in half, or winter feed used in July because grassland had scorched to brown.
Farmers speak often about resilience, but many now use the word differently. They no longer mean coping with an occasional shock. They mean surviving a permanently altered baseline.
The worry reaches beyond the farm gate. The UK imports about 46 percent of its food. If domestic production declines further, reliance on international markets will rise, pushing food prices into greater volatility. DEFRA modelling suggests that without adaptation, UK-grown food output could fall significantly by mid-century.
Food security, in this context, becomes national security. As the NFU has repeatedly said: “We cannot feed a nation on wishful thinking.”
Policy: the missing coherence
Farmers, scientists and environmental groups now share one core frustration. Government policy is fragmented. Water strategy, agricultural subsidies, climate adaptation planning and trade policy often pull in different directions.
The proposed National Land Use Framework is seen by many as a chance to align these pressures. The idea is simple: put the right activity on the right land. Protect high-value soils for food production. Support nature recovery on marginal land. Integrate water storage into agricultural planning. And do so with evidence, not political fashion.
DEFRA’s own advisers have stressed the urgency. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) stated in its 2024 Progress Report: “The UK lacks a cohesive plan for agricultural adaptation. Delay will increase costs and risks to food security.”
Farmers echo this with growing weariness. “We know what we need to do,” says Somerset farmer Lucy Radford. “But we need policy that matches the scale of the climate we are farming in.”
A way forward: hope rooted in the ground
Despite the scale of the crisis, the solutions are real and already visible. Regenerative soil practices reduce vulnerability to drought. Better water management can buffer the extremes. Science-led innovation, from drought-tolerant varieties to precision irrigation, can lift yields without exhausting landscapes. And a coherent national policy could help align incentives rather than scatter them.
Hope, in agriculture, rarely comes in sweeping announcements. It arrives slowly, like the way a healthy field holds onto rain a little longer. It grows in the fungi lacing through the soil. It settles in the reservoirs farmers build before they need them. It rests in the recognition that climate change is not something happening to farming, but something farming can respond to if government, science and land stewardship move together.
The loss of 2025 is a warning, but also a signpost. British farming is not doomed. It is, however, standing in a narrowing corridor. The way forward depends on rebuilding the resilience that once lay beneath our feet.
If the past year has taught us anything, it is that soil, water and climate are not separate stories. They are threads of the same tapestry, and the strength of our food system depends on weaving them back together.
