A combination of the beast from the east and a dismal bank holiday weekend has put the nation’s crops on hold

Last year, asparagus growers were harvesting as early as 8 April. This spring, they are not expecting to harvest their open-field crop until the last week of April – a week later than the official start of the season, St George’s Day, 23 April. Welcome to just one of the consequences of Britain’s disastrously delayed spring.

“We have had a very challenging time,” said Guy Smith, vice president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). “March breezed in with the ‘beast from the east’ and went out with the worst bank holiday on record.” For asparagus-lovers there is at least an upside. “The combination has to be right for the crowns to push through,” explained Per Hogberg, of grower Wealmoor. “The air temperature has to be at least 12C, while the soil temperature should be between 8C and 10C. With warmer weather expected, consumers can expect a bumper crop in mid-May,” he said.

It is not just asparagus growers praying for a warm, dry spell. The earlier farmers can sow, the more chance their crops have to achieve their potential. “My father was a farmer and one of his sayings was ‘a peck of dust in March was worth a king’s ransom’,” Smith said. “If the ground is nice and friable and makes a good seed-bed then it can be potentially quite lucrative for the farmer. Well, that’s gone this year.”

Farmers griping about the weather goes with the job. But Smith fears something is happening to Britain’s weather that has consequences which stretch far beyond farming.

“We farm in north-east Essex, in the driest spot in the British Isles, and so we’re keen observers of the British weather. More often now we seem to be stuck in long periods of wet months and then long periods of dry months, which is more challenging for farmers.”

Adam Lockwood grows spring onions in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire. “At the minute we’re struggling to get going,” he said. “Potato growers haven’t even started planting yet and drilling dates are well behind where they should be.

“We’re lucky in one sense that what we’re doing is all seed. I can buy seed and put it in a shed and it doesn’t matter, but lettuce and brassica growers who have plants raised in a nursery that were ready weeks ago, they’re now having to throw those away.”

Like Smith, Lockwood thinks that the climate is changing. “We’re getting more rain in a shorter period rather than evenly distributed across the year – that’s what I’m noticing. And you’re getting more intense dry periods. It’s more extreme.”

Livestock and dairy producers have been particularly hard hit. “It’s been a very late spring, even for a hill farm where we are,” said Richard Findlay, chair of the NFU’s livestock board, who farms in the North York Moors National Park.

“Instead of keeping the sheep in a couple of days after they’ve had lambs, we’re keeping them in for two or three weeks. We’re very fortunate in that we have the buildings to do it, but a lot of neighbours who don’t are struggling and have had many more losses.

“We have nearly 1,000 sheep and it’s costing us about £1,000 extra a week at the moment to feed and house them to avoid a lot of losses. If we turned them out in poor weather there would be very little grass to eat.”

Findlay believes that it will be farmers who end up absorbing the extra costs, rather than consumers. But this puts them at the mercy of the markets, and poor prices for their lambs later in the year could see some producers call it a day. “It’s been the worst and most challenging time that I can remember,” Findlay said. “It really started last summer, which was very wet and quite cool, and the autumn and winter have generally been very wet. Sheep can stand cold weather and they can stand wet weather but when there is a prolonged period of both, it really pulls them down. We would normally expect to lose 1% of the ewe flock in this winter period and we’ve probably lost 3% to 4%, despite our best efforts.”

What the farmers are experiencing first-hand accords with what scientists are finding. Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at NCAS-Climate, University of Reading, who helps run www.WeatherRescue.org – a site where volunteers digitise millions of historical weather observations – says that UK temperatures have risen by around 1.5 degrees in the last 150 years.

“It’s basic physics: warmer air can hold more moisture so, as the atmosphere warms, it means, when it does rain heavily, we get more rain than we would otherwise have done from the same storm 100 years ago.”

In the short term, farmers like Smith hope that the coming week’s warmer, drier conditions are going to stretch through April. In the longer term, he believes that the first three months of 2018 should sound alarm bells.

“We need to remember that it’s reckless to take food production for granted,” he said.

Counting the cost of Britain’s recent bad weather





Asparagus

Growers say their crops will not be ready until the end of the month, almost three weeks late.



Potatoes



Many growers have yet to plant.



Spring onions

Seeds which should have been sown back in February yet to go in.



Lamb and beef



Stocks have been kept indoors for weeks, meaning higher fodder prices and possible price rises for consumers.



Brassicas and lettuce

Plants due to go into the fields have had to be thrown away.



Arable

Spring barley and spring wheat weeks behind sowing schedule.



• The name of the North York Moors National Park was corrected on 19 April 2018.

