Crops are “suffering” after Yorkshire saw its driest combined February, March and April in 90 years, a farmer has said.
Richard Bramley, an arable farmer in Kelfield near Selby, told The Press the dry weather has prevented crops from growing.
Rainfall was well below average for most of the UK last month, with just 56 per cent of expected totals recorded.
“A key ingredient for a plant to grow in a temperate climate is moisture,” said Mr Bramley, who has been a farmer for more than 30 years. “They can cope with a degree of variants – too much and too little – but when we get these regular occurrences now, being extremely wet or extremely dry, it does start to have an impact on them.”
“I think there’s already an impact on yield,” he said. “There’s certainly an impact on the speed of growth – stressed crops in warm weather tend to grow a lot quicker. That, in itself, brings challenges.
“If we don’t see any rain in the next week we’re going to start to see some serious deterioration in the potential of these crops. And there is no rain forecast.”
Mr Bramley’s farm, which has been in his family since the 1930s, produces bread wheat, malting barley, oil seed rape, sugar beet and more. Silverspoon sugar is among the companies it supplies produce to.
'These extremes seem to be more frequent'
The farmer said weather seasons becoming more unpredictable means it is harder to plan ahead.
Mr Bramley said “something is changing” and “all the signs are pointing towards this being climate change”. “I wouldn’t dispute what is being said on that front.”
“We’ve been used to extremes in weather,” he said. “You do get very dry periods; you do get very wet periods – that’s not unusual. But these extremes seem to be more frequent.”
Mr Bramley said the challenges posed by the changing climate come as the cost of farming continues to increase.
He said farming has “never been easy, but it’s very different to what it was 30 years ago”.
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Sofie Jenkinson is the co-director of Round Our Way, an organisation that supports people impacted by climate change in the UK.
She said “more and more farmers are struggling” to harvest their crops due to the “erratic and extreme weather caused by climate change”.
“We need to see more support for those on the sharp end of climate impacts in the UK and further political action, which is essential in tackling the causes such as emissions, to ensure we don’t see things getting worse in our communities and at our doorstep,” Ms Jenkinson said.
