WE NEED A STRATEGIC WATER PLAN AND JOINED-UP THINKING TO AVOID DROUGHT IN 2026

While much of our attention has been grabbed by speculation about what more damage Rachel Reeves might do when she delivers her second Budget next week, inheritance and succession are not the only dangers facing farming, writes Tom Corfield.  And as ever, perhaps the most serious relates to the weather.

2025 has been a brutally dry year for farmers.  The spring was the driest in 132 years, and the summer was the hottest since records began in 1884.  That has had a real impact on the 2025 harvest, but the effects don’t stop there.

The Environment Agency reports that eight out of the past ten months have seen below-average rainfall, with the result that we are heading into winter with soils, aquifers and reservoirs severely depleted.

It may seem odd to be talking about drought the week after the region was deluged by storm Caludia, but the reality is that this was the first serious rainfall this autumn.  If we don’t get more over the winter, we will face a serious threat of drought in the spring.

The Met Office has run rainfall modelling, and predicts that if the winter sees 80% of average rainfall, ‘drought conditions would intensify’, and if that figure fell to 60%, all of England would be in drought by the spring.

Of course, farming has always been at the mercy of the weather, and the temptation is to think that there is nothing we can do about it.  But if this year gives an insight of what climate change is to bring, we all have to make long-term plans for the future, and that will require some joined-up thinking from statutory agencies, not something which is generally in plentiful supply.

Farmers can help themselves by switching to drought-tolerant crops, collaborating on water sharing, replenishing reservoirs whenever possible, and minimising waste, but ultimately the solution has to be on a more macro level.

We need local planning authorities to be more proactive in supporting applications to build new reservoirs, but we also need the Environment Agency to recognise that without sufficient abstraction licences, there is little point creating reservoir capacity.  There also needs to be some mechanism which allows ‘over abstraction’ during periods of torrential rainfall, which would help stock winter fill reservoirs ready to meet the needs of food production the following season.

Perhaps some kind of strategic water plan for agriculture, which the EA, planning authorities  and the various food alliance groups all sign up to, is needed.  This would need to consider all of the sectors which draw on an increasingly scarce water supply, not least house building; but that would also require joined-up government thinking, which is about as rare as rain has been this year.