As temperatures soar, ‘exceptionally serious’ drought imperils UK farmers

Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom – Tom Pearson looks down at a crack in his own field, wide enough to plunge his fingers into.

Beneath the stubble of a freshly combined oat crop on his Manor Farm in Caxton, near Cambridge, the ground has split, the soil having lost so much moisture that it has torn apart. A cover crop planted to shield the ground beneath the oats never really established before the early heat of this growing season arrived.

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“It makes you wonder if it’s worth it,” Pearson said, looking out over the land his family has held since the 1680s. He then reconsiders. The cracks could have been worse – as in, he could have pushed his hand and forearm into them – if he had not spent the past 11 years trying to build resilience into this soil.

No one is happy about this growing season in the United Kingdom and across Europe – neither the conventional farmers watching their yields collapse nor those who have spent a decade trying to prepare for exactly this scenario.

Almost three-quarters of land in England is currently in drought after record-low rainfall and unusually high temperatures.

As the fifth heatwave of the summer arrives, England and Wales have recorded their driest July since records began in 1836.

Large stretches of the country have seen barely a 10th of the rain they would expect in an average month. For farmers, the consequences are hard to ignore.

“The fact that we’ve harvested more than half the winter wheat crop before the end of July reflects the challenging growing season many arable farmers have experienced,” said Jamie Burrows, chair of the National Farmers’ Union’s Combinable Crops Board.

He said the industry urgently needs government investment in crop varieties bred for drought and disease resistance, alongside a planning system that makes it easier to build on-farm water storage.

This is not an isolated year. It is the third drought in five years and the second in a row – a pattern the National Drought Group’s chair, Helen Wakeham, has called “an exceptionally serious situation” with “long-lasting impacts”.

‘We’re still being hit quite badly’

Pearson did not set out to be a farmer.

He trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, worked in the NHS, and spent time in humanitarian aid work overseas before returning to his family’s land in 2015 with no formal agricultural training.

What he brought instead was a habit of testing evidence rather than assumptions.

He moved towards regenerative methods, including no-till farming and sharply reduced chemical inputs – and this year, into small plots of ancient grain varieties sourced from seed banks in the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic and the John Innes Centre in Norwich.

“They’ve got deep roots, they’re used to growing in drier situations,” he said. “It’s probably the perfect year for them.”

Einkorn and emmer are among the earliest wheat species domesticated by humans about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of what today would be parts of Iraq, Syria and southeastern Turkiye.

They were domesticated thousands of years before modern fertilisers and intensive agricultural systems, as their wild ancestors evolved under water-limited conditions.

But the rest of Pearson’s farm tells a more complicated story.

His yields are down for a third consecutive year. Even with the marginal benefits of reduced tillage – using half the diesel of a conventional farm – it has not been enough to offset three years of poor harvests.

“We know we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “We’re measuring it, we’re moving forwards from a carbon and soil biology point of view … but we’re still being hit quite badly with these extreme weather events.”

War and weather

Farmers went into this growing season already exposed.

Fuel and fertiliser prices surged this spring after United States and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, disrupting global energy and fertiliser markets.

Drought then arrived shortly after seeding.

The regenerative farming Pearson has championed is often presented as one way of improving resilience to climate stress and the uncertainty of global energy markets.

The argument is that healthier soils can retain more water, while lower input costs – less fuel, fertiliser and chemical sprays – can partly offset the potential of lower yields.

But he is careful not to oversell it.

“We’ve absolutely bought into the fact that we’re nature-friendly farmers,” he said. “But we’re taking fairly epic hits on our profits because we’re making change, and that’s risk in business.”

Even the best-managed soil has its limits.

“We’re talking about an extreme weather event that even the best soils might not survive with,” he said.

The scale of the challenge goes well beyond Pearson’s fields in the UK.

Rowan Douglas, an insurance risk specialist and former head of Howden’s Climate Risk and Resilience team, led a study published in May 2025 by the European Investment Bank and European Commission modelling agricultural climate risk across the European Union.

The research found that extreme-weather losses already average 28 billion euros ($32bn) a year across the bloc, rising to 40 billion euros ($46bn) by 2050. In a bad year, that figure could reach 60 billion euros ($70bn) now, or 100 billion euros ($115bn) by mid-century, with yields down by a fifth across the EU.

Roughly 80 percent of that risk is currently uninsured, borne directly by farmers. The UK, outside the EU and outside that study, has no comprehensive national crop-insurance scheme for farmers.

Pearson’s own ask of the government is less about subsidy levels than about knowledge.

He supports the shift towards paying farmers for public goods like soil health, but argues the industry is still “a bit short on the knowledge, a bit short on the data” – particularly on nutritional benefits and which varieties can realistically withstand these conditions.

Douglas, the risk specialist, argued the most useful first step is to properly quantify the financial risk the nation is already facing, the way his team did for the rest of the EU.

“Britain could do it better than anyone else because we’ve got better data and great institutions,” he said, meaning the underlying capacity to do this work well, even if the work itself is still outstanding.

The harder question, in his view, is how fairly to share the growing burden of risk between farmers and everyone who benefits from what they grow.

Back in his field, Pearson gestures towards a cluster of new housing across the road from his farm.

The local town is creeping closer, and he has started treating that proximity as an asset rather than a threat.

He talks about peri-urban farming so a portion of what he grows can reach nearby tables directly. It is a small step, but it points to something larger – helping people understand what they eat, where it comes from, and how a changing climate is now shaping both.

Reporting from Al Jazeera contributed to this story.