A farmer will lose £100,000 this year after excessive rainfall turned his home into an island. Land owned by Henry Ward, 33, has been accessible only via boat since October 2023, when Storm Babet flooded the Barlings Eau River in two places.
The river’s waters surged more than a metre over its barriers following devastating rain, causing internal flooding at 583 properties.
While many of those properties – which included private homes and schools – are now dry and safe, Mr Ward’s Lincolnshire farmland remains inaccessible on foot. When the initial deluge happened, he is claimed to have lost £35,000 overnight.
But the financial burden of this weather goes deeper – as Mr Ward lays bare the risks of planting anymore crops in the same area – a loss which will cost him £100k if he grows nothing this year.
His Lincolnshire farmhouse has sat on a thin strip of land surrounded by murky waters for the last six months.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the farmer told how the deluge destroyed his valuable wheat, rapeseed and vining crops overnight.
He said the still-submerged fields have been rendered “worthless”, and he expects to lose nearly three times as much as the £35,000 he lost overnight in 2023 this year.
With a mile of riverbank left “substandard”, he said he “cannot risk planting crops on this land again”.
A year without harvest will leave the farmer with £100,000 of revenue losses, and the looming risk of further flooding remains despite repairs paid for by the Environment Agency.
The agency spent £3.5 million plugging riverbank breaches during a previous occasion when his land flooded in 2019 and pledged a further £450,000 for temporary repairs following last year’s deluge.
Mr Ward believes the latest repairs have just a three-year lifespan and that flooding will “only get worse” as the climate crisis deepens.
He said: “We need to look at the bigger picture. Clearly, this is unsustainable and a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.”
“It’s just going to keep happening, and it’s going to get worse. Climate change isn’t going away.”
He added: “I’ve lost a full year’s income from this most recent flooding. It has been horrendous, I’m a farmer and am not going to have a harvest this year – it’s obviously a huge worry.”
Mr Ward is far from the only farmer to have lost out significantly following Storm Babet, with Strathisla Farms manager Adrian Ivory believing he had lost £10,000 in one night last year.
