Farmers are worried more extreme weather this year will hit crops grown for food and livestock.
Last year Britain experienced an unprecedented heatwave with temperatures soaring to as high as 40 degrees Celsius. The extreme heat and lack of rain had a detrimental effect on Britain’s farming industry, with crops failing to grow.
Luke Burnage is a co-owner of Six Hills Farm in Leicestershire and is worried about what another water drought and heatwave would do to his farm.
“A heatwave would not be ideal, last year we could only get one crop of grass off the fields, and the grass conditions affected our livestock. On the crops side the wheat didn’t turn out too bad, but the beans struggled to grow and didn’t reach the size we would usually expect,” said Mr Burnage.
In addition to weather issues, financial cuts caused by Brexit have also affected farms like Mr Burnage’s “the Government have slowed down on farm payments and eventually will stop them all together, without these subsides some farms will struggle to fund their farm in the future”
This spring there were shortages of some fruit and vegetables because of extreme weather in Europe.
National Farmers Union spokesperson James Peck “The NFU has been warning about potential food shortages for more than a year. The tragic events in Ukraine have driven inflation, particularly energy inflation, to levels that we haven’t seen before.”
