Wet winters and dry spring a 'double whammy' says manager of farm on Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border
According to the Met Office its the sixth driest spring since records began in 1836
A manager of a farm on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border says he’s never seen anything like the current spell of dry weather.
On Monday (2 June) the Met Office announced the UK, and all four nations, recorded their warmest spring for mean temperature since it began recording it in 1884 which beat the previous record from 2024.
It said by mid-May the UK was experiencing its ‘driest spring in over 100 years’, and although recent wet weather has eased conditions slightly, spring 2025 still ranks as the sixth driest spring since this series began in 1836.
'Double whammy'
Just 128.2mm of rainfall fell during the spring period, which according to the Met Office records was approximately 40% below the long-term average and still the driest spring in more than 50 years.
Jake Freestone has been the farm manager for Overbury Enterprises who are based on the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border near Tewkesbury for just over 20 years, he says it is becoming more a worry day-by-day.
"I've never known anything like this," he said.
"We've had some dry spells before but the weather has sort of broken before it becomes really serious, I'm not saying complete crop failure by any stretch, but it is getting to a more serious stage now.
"Over the three months of March, April and May, we had 49 millimetres of rain and our rolling 20-year average for that would be about 148mm, so we're on about a third of our rainfall for that period of time and that's putting our crops under quite a lot of stress."
"In the winter our plants couldn't get their roots down very deeply into the soil because it was wet, and in spring the roots haven't been able to explore as much of the soil as we would normally expect due to it being dry, so we're being hit kind of by a double whammy."
Drought declared in the north
The Environment Agency declared a drought status for the north-west of England following the driest start to spring in 69 years at the end of May.
It said river flows had been declining along with groundwater levels due to the dry March, April and start of May, with reservoir storage levels in the region also receding and were currently lower than they were at this time during the 1984, 1995 and 2022 drought years.
"It will be interesting to see how long the dry weather continues and whether we will still be allowed to continue to irrigate our crops," Freestone said.
"We're obviously taking water out of the streams in the river, so there might be some restrictions in what we can abstract in the future as the summer goes on.
"The rain we had last week was about 6 mm, which was nice, it sort of settled the dust and actually probably did a bit of good for wildlife more than anything, but from a practical farming point of view it didn't really do any good at all. "
Spring 2025 has been declared the fourth sunniest season overall for the UK, with only three summers sunnier since 1910.
Other Met Office data showed England was experiencing its driest spring in more than 100 years, beaten only by 1893, while Wales saw its sixth driest spring.