Joe has been unable to plant any significant crops this spring (Image: ROWAN GRIFFITHS)
Leicestershire farmer Joe Stanley, 39, is facing his first-ever year without harvest and stands to lose roughly £300,000 in a devastating outcome for his business.
From October 2023 to March 2024, an entire year’s worth of rain fell on Joe’s farm after intense storms, Babet and Henk.
He intends to plant a small area of spring oats later this month, but other than that, he will be forced to convert most of his farm into a “summer fallow”, which is cropland purposely kept out of production during a regular growing season.
He said: “For some, this weather is catastrophic.
“We would be looking to get maybe £300,000 in income from crops in a year and, goodness knows what we will end up with.
“Last year was almost similarly disastrous, not as bad but getting towards being as bad as where we are now.
“Goodness knows when it will stop raining.
“The majority of our farm is just going to be a non-cash crop this year, which is the first time that will have ever happened.
“So a year without a harvest has more or less been realised, unfortunately.”
Joe, a British Army veteran who graduated from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, later returning to the family farm in 2009, warned the implications of the wet weather crisis for the UK’s food supply were “enormous”.
He said: “It is not just crops like wheat and barley. Root vegetables can be badly impacted, too.
“And even the livestock sector because grass is not growing.
“Fields are too wet to put livestock out and those livestock farmers have already used up all of their winter fodder, and because of the poor weather conditions, they are not out there making silage for this winter, there is not going to be the straw available from arable crops because no one is planting arable crops for the bedding for those cattle this winter.
“So this is going to have significant knock-on effects.”
Climate change is “becoming an increasingly insuperable problem” for British farmers and consumers, Joe warned.
He said: “I’ve been doing conversations like this for years. We as a society need to address what climate change means for our food supply.
“Because we saw last spring, largely due to a mixture of energy costs and climate change, we had empty shelves.
“Lots of salads and vegetables were not available. And this is not normal.
“This is not what British people in the developed world have come to expect – but it is going to become the norm increasingly.”
