Wiltshire farmer says extreme weather has led to record early harvest

A Wiltshire farmer says extreme weather conditions and drought have seen him harvest his crops at the earliest point ever.

Tim Carson, an arable farmer at Alton Barnes in Pewsey Vale, said his usual marker of the start of September for early harvest has been eclipsed by several weeks due to the dry weather of recent months.

"The drought and extreme weather has brought things forward," he said. "In the past, we would probably start harvesting third week of July, the oil seed rape and the winter barley, and then wheat would be about mid-August. My sort of cut off date always used to be my daughter's birthday, which was sort of 4th of September.

"But to finish on the 25th of July was unbelievable."

He said the relentless heat had seen his crops fail to ripen natural, with them stressing and "closing down" as a result.

"We've had very little rain since the beginning of March, apart from the 60 millimetres in the first week of June, which saved it to a certain extent," he told us.

Yields are down across the country, with a variation that Tim says is down who got lucky with some rain, saying it can make "all the difference to yields". He described farming as "10% management and 90% weather".

One upside to the sunshine is that the wheat is good quality, with high protein, meaning Tim is hopeful that millers won't need to import Canadian red wheat due to needing a higher protein wheat.

But he said commodity costs remain "frighteningly low" and barely allow farmers to recover costs, while the Iran war means fertilizer prices have become more expensive per tonne.

He warned that farms are also under increasing financial pressure, with making commitments to crops without knowledge that they will be able to recover their costs.

"I'm paying for the seed for next year already. I'm paying for the fertilizer already for next year. I'll have no income coming in until we have the harvest of 27. And so you're laying out all this and you haven't got a clue what the prices are going to be."

Self-sufficiency worryingly low

There is a fear that the increasing extremity of weather patterns is going to put even more pressure on the UK's reliance on imported food.

Tim said that parts of the America's are having poorer harvests due to the heat they're experiencing saying he imagines supplies "could get quite tight this year and next year".

He said he's worried by Britain being around 55% self-sufficient for food production, because other countries will be less able to export if their own yields are suffering.

"They need to satisfy their demands at home first. So we're not going to be on top of their list," he said. "So food security needs to be seriously looked at by this, well, by any government. It is vital. We need to be able to feed our nation and we have got up to 85% self-sufficient before, but that has dropped sadly. We could be in a tricky position this time next year."

He explained that weather patterns are making harvests unpredictable, telling us last year's harvest was the worst he'd had during his career at Alton Barnes farm.

"That was due to the fact that the crops didn't get established well in that autumn and they got muddled in in November," Tim said. "The difference this year was last autumn, we got the crops in to really good conditions. And I think that's enabled them to survive through this extreme weather better than the year before."