Historic drought hammers Welsh farming

Driving around north east Wales in the past few days, the lack of rainfall for months is obvious.  

Fields and hillsides are burnt brown, or a deep yellow after hay was harvested, and the first silage cut in late spring.

Unsurprisingly, farmers are deeply worried about their crops and livestock. Matthew Roberts is the third generation of his family to farm at Tŷ Draw, Llanasa in Flintshire.

With his father David and eldest son Harry, who's just completed his final year in high school, Roberts manages 1,400 sheep and about 300 cattle.

"We haven't had much rainfall since May," he tells CGTN. "It's a recurring thing every year now, but this one started sooner. This time last year we were going into a drought again, but it was later on."

Carrying water in large tanks to supply their sheep is vital, but they are already facing extra costs.

"We can't make any more silage because there's nothing growing, so you're using your winter fodder already," he explains. "There's a lot of dairy farmers that are feeding a lot of silage, and you wonder then – when are we going to be able to make that crop? If it rained today, would be six, seven, eight weeks before the grass would recover."

North Wales this year was the first area in Britain to be declared a drought area. But now all of Wales and seven regions of England are classified in the same way.

Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water own 91 reservoirs in Wales, and say levels are normal for the time of year: "The summer started with a relatively wet early June period which replenished our reservoir storages prior to the current dry weather."

On the Hiraethog upland in north Wales, several of the larger reservoirs seemed full, but the smaller Llyn Aled Isaf was largely empty. It usually holds more than a million liters of water.

Farmers are allowed to take up to 20 cubic meters of water per day without an abstraction license. But the prolonged dry spell is putting pressure on them.

"July is one of the driest on records in 190 years, unless we get some impactful rainfall in the next couple of days - that in itself is a massive indicator," says Sara Pearson, who works for environment agency Natural Resources Wales as land and assets operations manager in the northeast of Wales.

"We've got low groundwater levels, the rivers are suffering, there's no high flows at all. We're seeing environmental impacts, whether it be fish or invertebrates or other animals being impacted by the lack of water around."

Pearson says that what would previously have been unusual in north-west Europe is becoming normal – and although perhaps not as dramatic headline news as the wildfires, it is in its own way still very damaging.

"When you look at what's happening in Spain and France, you can understand there the term 'catastrophic' is probably quite appropriate given the impact on people's lives," she says. "We are seeing (here) the impact day to day in terms of the environment. 

"Although people might not be feeling much of a difference other than the heat, there are small impacts –  but in terms of potential, look no further than France or Spain to see how bad it could get with no rainfall."

It's a worry echoed by Professor Prysor Williams, from Bangor University's School of Environmental and Natural Sciences.

"This year in particular we've seen month after month of really high temperatures coupled with extremely low rainfalls," he says. "Put those two factors together and we've got a really difficult scenario where we're facing extreme droughts. 

"The implications of this drought will be here for a good while – even if it does start raining quite soon."

Wildfires are another growing factor. By now they are almost expected in Mediterranean Europe – as seen again this year in Greece, France and Spain – but this year they have also blighted Wales and England. 

In early summer there were two serious fires burning the Sychnant pass near Conwy and the Rhinogydd mountains in Gwynedd – and it's bringing problems closer to home.

"Wildfires in Wales are almost unheard of on the scale that we've seen over the last few weeks," says Williams. 

"We've tended to think about climate change as something that happens on the other side of the world, or at least very far away, and we're sort of immune from it – but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore."

For farmers like Roberts, that means they're facing decisions now that could impact agriculture next year.

"We're going to have to buy more feed in, because we're getting into this stage now where we have to put the rams in with the sheep for next year's lambing crop," he says. "If those sheep aren't in good condition when they go to the ram, our lambs crop is less next year. So that's a big hit to our business."

It is, says Williams, another sign that climate change is happening – and it impacts people's lives and food production.  

"What we have in Europe in particular is big populations in towns and cities, in areas that are immediately affected by wildfire. Maybe in other parts of the world we haven't got those dense populations in quite the same way.

"It's often said that humans won't take climate change seriously until it starts to affect humans."