Farm manager on Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border: Dry summer to impact farms 'for months to come'
Met Office figures show the period from January to July this year was the driest since 1929
This year's dry summer could impact farmers into next year says the manager of a farm on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border.
Met Office figures show the period from January to July this year was the driest since 1929.
It follows England experiencing its driest spring in more than 100 years, beaten only by 1893.
Last month, the Environment Agency declared drought status for the West Midlands, while the Gloucestershire region has been experiencing 'prolonged dry weather'.
Other data also shows so far this summer rainfall is tracking below average, with 72% of the of the whole summer’s long-term average recorded whereas at this point in the season 93% is the expected amount.
The Met Office are anticipating those numbers to change due to the unsettled weather in the forecast for the end of August to bring an end to the meteorological summer.
Jake Freestone is farm manager Overbury Enterprises, which is an arable and sheep farm based near Tewksbury, Gloucestershire, who have pastures on Bredon Hill, Worcestershire.
He says the weather has meant it only took them 24 days to fully harvest this summer, which he says ended up being really disappointing.
"The last time we had yield in this sort of ballpark really was in the 1976 drought when we were sort of experiencing a 30% reduction in our five-year average of wheat yields, spring barley was 25% down, oats were about 50% down," he said.
"To give an example of where rainfall usually is from March to August, we've only had 106mm of rain and we would normally have about 350mm over that period, so we've had about less than a third.
"The ground is so hard it's got big cracks in it so when it does rain a lot of that water is going to disappear down into the cracks."
Summer set to be warmest on record for the UK
With a few days left of the official summer period, statistics from the Met Office show that summer 2025 will ‘almost certainly’ be the warmest summer on record for the UK.
Its data shows the UK’s mean temperature from 1 June to 25 August currently stands at 16.13°C, which is 1.54°C above the long-term meteorological average.
2018 is currently classed as the warmest summer since 1884 when the records began, with a mean temperature of 15.76°C.
Mr Freestone says this type of weather is going to have an impact long-term on farms which will run into next year.
He said: "Going forward this drought is going to have repercussions for the next nine months or something like that, so before we can start cutting hay and silage again next spring.
"We would normally have planted all of our oil seed rape crops by now but it's been too dry to plant those and by about the fifth or sixth of September, the window is closed for planting that, so that is going to be a crop we might not have next year.
"The prospect of a relatively dry winter is really worrying for next year though, if we don't have a decent winter rainfall topping up the streams, the rivers, the reservoir, it has the potential to make next summer even worse."
Four heatwaves have also occurred throughout the summer, although none have come close to causing the temperature to break the UK's all-time record of 40.3°C set in July 2022, the highest this year being 35.8°C in Faversham, Kent.