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“I hadn’t planned on this barn being this full,” says Andrew Barr, as he runs the foxy-red wheat grains through his hands. A great wall of straw bales is holding back 300 tonnes of wheat and that is just a tenth of the harvest from Barr’s East Lenham farm in Kent. “And the winter barley was a record: the best I’ve ever got,” he says.
After a run of rain-wrecked years, British farmers are bringing in the last of what looks like a bumper cereals harvest. A mild winter and early spring got the wheat, barley and oats off to a flying start, then regular but light rain watered the growing shoots. Most of all, it has been bright. “It’s all about sunshine – photosynthesis – and we got a lot of sun,” says Barr, the fourth generation of his family to till the varied soils of the North Downs and the Weald.
Wheat is the nation’s staple and its biggest crop. Jack Watts, lead market intelligence analyst at the farmer-funded HGCA organisation, says 2014 could be the biggest yield ever for wheat when the final data is released in October. “It’s a bit close to call yet whether we set a new record, but it’s certainly possible,” he says. “In terms of yield, farmers will be very happy with what they are getting.”
Guy Gagen, chief arable adviser to the National Farmer’s Union, agrees: “Some people are saying they have had their best yield ever.”
Even if the wheat yield only matches the current record year of 2008, it will still be at least a third up on the dismal years of 2012 and 2013. But for farmers, the abundance comes at a heavy cost: the plentiful grain means prices are on the floor.
“It’s a rock bottom price at the moment,” says Barr, not far off half the price in 2012. “I budgeted for selling my wheat at £150 a tonne, but just this morning I got offered £103. I didn’t take it.”
He is thankful he sold some of his crop ahead of the harvest through futures contracts. “If I had not sold some forward, I would be in the mire, despite having some of the best yields I have ever had. It’s pretty sad but, price-wise, you end up hoping that somewhere else is going to have a bit of a disaster.”
“We have had no real problems right across the northern hemisphere,” says Watts. “The world is looking at a plentiful harvest for 2014-15.”
However, while not disasters, France and Germany have had wet weather problems. “Dampness wrecks the quality because, when the rain gets into the grain, it starts to break it down,” says Gagen.
UK grain is ripe for export for baguette-making, while French wheat is downgraded to animal feed. However, wheat is just one of the many costs of putting bread on shop shelves alongside distribution and baking, so low grain prices are not expected to lower the price of a loaf.
About 85% of the UK’s arable crops have now been harvested and much was brought in ahead of the wet August weather that dampened the end of the school holidays. But the harvest is just beginning for those growing many vegetables and “top fruit” – apples and pears. The problem for them is that disease flourishes in the sultry combination of damp and heat, and the Met Office says the year to August in 2014 has been both the warmest and wettest since UK records began in 1910.
“Early in the season, things were looking good,” says Lee Abbey, horticultural adviser to the NFU. “But as things have progressed there has been disease pressure, and the warmth and dampness has encouraged blight on potatoes.”
Worcestershire apple grower Alison Capper expects to start picking her Gala apples next week. “We have had ideal growing conditions,” she says, but also issues with mildews. “Both scab and russet affect the skin finish – the apple doesn’t look as perfect, meaning that while the overall crop looks likely to be higher, the class 1 fruit that supermarkets take will be only be the same as 2013.”
Capper is also facing pressure from a far more distant source – the conflict in Ukraine and the consequent ban by Russia on food imports from the EU. “Fruit that was destined for Russia [from France, Poland, Germany and Italy] now has nowhere to go,” she says. “So UK growers are having to put their faith in supermarkets to support them and not go chasing cheap imports.”
Adrian Barlow, chief executive of English Apples and Pears, says the risk of a flood of cheap fruit from the continent is low, not least because British shoppers do not like the larger apples and pears grown in Europe. Furthermore, he says, frost problems in the Balkans and Turkey mean they are looking to imports and the European Commission is also buying up fruit to give away to schools. But the final situation, Barlow says, will not be clear until October when most the British crop will have been picked.
Capper also grows hops for beer making, which began harvesting in the last few days and are also on track to produce a good yield. “We have had ideal growing conditions,” she says. “A nice, warm summer and lovely, gentle, regular rain.”
UK hop growers are benefiting from the ongoing boom in craft beers in the US, where brewers value the delicate but more complex flavour of English hops. “They give you a much more rounded and drinkable session beer,” says Capper, noting that hop exports to the US have doubled since 2009 and account for half the harvest.
Sarah Dawson, who is credited with bringing purple sprouting broccoli to the mass market in the UK from her Lincolnshire farm, is another farmer expecting a decent year. The build-up of mildew, white blister and other diseases in the last month or so does not seriously affect the heads of flowering brassicas like broccoli and cauliflowers. “But they do affect all the cabbage types for example,” she says. “So cabbage producers will be feeling a moderate level of disease pressure right now.”
Overall, for top fruit and vegetables, says Abbey, “Yields will probably be up but quality may be down [due to disease] and so the marketable crop – what you can actually sell - will probably be average or slightly above average.”
Back in Kent, Barr is looking down on his farm from the North Downs. “In the summer you saw the countryside open up before you, all golden brown, and it’s one of the great things about being a farmer,” he says. “It’s is a great pleasure when you go out at harvest and, after all the hard work over the years, you see a lot coming in.”
But Barr says it is difficult to deal with the mixed emotions brought by plummeting prices. “You get the joy and satisfaction of harvesting a record crop, but the prices takes the shine off it,” he says. “I feel heavy worry and stress that come from having a family reliant on me and my own business. And there is also a feeling of not wanting to be the one that undoes all the previous generations’ good work.”
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