UK farmers face uncertainty over 2025 crop production

Where winter wheat should be growing is a sea of thick mud, the field empty and unproductive. It means yet more losses for fourth-generation farmer Richard Heady. 

His farm usually grows wheat, barley, beans and oats across 3 square kilometers of arable land, but here yield sunk by a third after extreme weather disrupted production cycles last year. 

"For the last two years we've had really wet autumns," Heady tells CGTN. "And that's the time of year we plant most of our crops – so if it's really wet then, we can't get the crops in the ground and therefore we miss out on crop potential."

Last winter was England's wettest on record, leaving much farmland unworkable. "[UK] production was down 20 percent, which is quite a notable fall when you consider the year before was an average crop," says Helen Plant, an analyst at the UK Agriculture and Development Board. 

"That was a combination of a smaller area, the amount that farmers either weren't able to plant because of the persistent wet weather, or from crops that were lost over the winter from being waterlogged - and the poor start to the spring meant crops didn't grow as well."

Early predictions indicate 2025 could be a slightly better year for farmers. 

"We ran a survey in November and that pointed to a rise of around 5 percent in the UK wheat area," says Plant. "Wheat is our biggest crop, our main cash crop. There is some optimism that a bit more may have been planted since then, particularly through the winter periods where we had dry settled conditions for a bit."

However, given the previous 20 percent drop, a 5 percent increase would still mean below-average harvests – and farmers are yet unsure how much spring crop they can successfully plant. 

"I'm fairly pessimistic this year, we've still got a lot of crops to plant," says Heady. "We need a good dry window in the spring to do that and with the weather at the minute looking so wet, we're not sure when that's going to come." 

Wet conditions make it difficult for farmers to get tractors on fields for planting and it's also harder for seeds to establish. Over time, excess rain can also lead to longer term soil damage. Farmers can grow other crops on different rotations to try to work around the weather, but this is often less productive. 

"The weather is everything to a farm," says Heady. "If the rain doesn't come, we don't get a crop. If the rain comes too hard, we don't get a crop. So we need to find ways we can work with the changing climate, but it is a huge worry that kind of heavier downpours are really going to affect us going forwards."

 The challenge now is for farmers to adapt to that changing climate to produce food. 

"Hopefully farming methods can improve constantly, which will make us more resilient in the long run," says Heady. "But that's quite a long-term goal, so we've just got to take small steps in that direction.

"We're trying to improve the farm with regenerative farming practices – hopefully we can improve the quality of the soil, so the roots can penetrate deeper, and the crops can hold more moisture in the dry spring and penetrate roots to find the moisture when they need it and also in a wet season."

There are government-led incentives for farmers to use more sustainable or less intensive methods, adding biodiversity to increase carbon in the soil, which in turn helps mitigate against excess rain. But this creates a dilemma. 

"Farmers are trying to balance a lot of things, from helping the biodiversity crisis to providing food for our nation," says Nicola Cannon, a researcher at The Royal Agricultural University. "Those options can be good because they can help sequester carbon within the soils and they can help with biodiversity.

"But the problem for a farmer is, they've got to look at the amount of money, the margin they're going to make by growing a crop, against the margin they may make by being in an environmental scheme and create the appropriate balance between the two."