England is on course for its worst harvest since comparable records began in 1984, according to analysis published this week, after a spring and summer of record heat and record-low rainfall left cereal crops withering in the field and prompted farming leaders, retailers and charities to demand that ministers treat food supply as a matter of national security.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) estimates that as much as 2.5 million tonnes has been stripped from expected cereal and oilseed production, costing farmers between £305m and £390m in lost revenue. The think tank projects a total cereals and oilseeds crop of about 19.5 million tonnes, which would overtake 2020 as the poorest on record in more than four decades.
The figures land as more than half of England and the whole of Wales sit in official drought, with around 23 million people in England and Wales subject to hosepipe bans. Provisional Met Office data indicates England received just 8% of its average July rainfall, making it likely the driest July on record, with some southern areas recording as little as 1% of expected rainfall.
"It's just been completely brutal for our industry."
That assessment, from a farmer quoted anonymously in the ECIU release, has become the shorthand for a season that few in the industry expected. As recently as March and April, European and American agricultural forecasters projected UK yields at or above their 10-year averages.
The first official yield indications, published by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) on 31 July and covering data to 27 July, show wheat averaging 6.8 tonnes per hectare, down 13% on the five-year average, with roughly half the crop cut. Winter barley also came in at 6.8 t/ha, down 2%, with 95% harvested. Early and small samples put spring barley at 5.3 t/ha from 8% of the crop, and oats at 4.9 t/ha from 32%.
Tom Lancaster, land, food and farming analyst at the ECIU, described a "climate doom loop" in which repeated weather shocks erode farmers' ability to recover between seasons. He said the country's "green and pleasant land" was becoming "parched and increasingly unproductive", adding that growers "are doing their heroic best to bring in the harvest, but they can't change the weather".
For many farms this is the third difficult year in succession. England recorded its second-worst harvest on record in 2024, following the wettest winter in almost 200 years, and 2025 was again described as the second worst. Defra's final 2025 estimate put the wheat harvest at 12 million tonnes, up 7.3% on the previous year but on an area 9.1% larger, with yields of 7.2 t/ha; barley fell 10% to 6.4 million tonnes and oat yields dropped 10%.
The National Farmers' Union has gone further than the yield data, warning of possible gaps on shelves. Its president, Tom Bradshaw, said wheat and oat yields were "very, very poor", that livestock farmers were already drawing on winter fodder because grass had stopped growing, and that vegetable producers were running short of irrigation water.
"It does feel like there is going to be some shortages of food products," he said, adding: "We can't change what's happening at the moment, there is no water in our rivers." His central argument is a linkage: "Water security is a critical part of our food security, and food security is our national security."
Bradshaw has written to the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who took office in late July, calling for tax breaks to help farmers build their own on-farm reservoirs and for heavier state investment in water storage, arguing that too much winter rainfall is pumped out to the North Sea rather than captured.
The Country Land and Business Association has framed the season as evidence of a new normal. Its president, Gavin Lane, said: "This is the third drought in five years. What was once extraordinary is becoming part of farming in Britain, and government must start planning for it." He warned that while farmers "have shown again and again that they can adapt", their "resilience has limits", and called for reservoirs, wildfire prevention funding and a well-funded Sustainable Farming Incentive open to all farms regardless of size or type.
The security framing gained institutional weight on 30 July, when more than 100 organisations wrote to Mr Burnham urging him to place food alongside defence and energy as a national priority. Coordinated by the Food Foundation, the signatories include Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi, the Co-op, Waitrose and Booths — together representing more than 64% of the grocery market — as well as Danone, Greencore, Samworth Brothers and Bidfood, alongside Barnardo's, Amnesty International UK and WWF-UK. The letter warns that "the next food shock is not a question of if, but when."
Their principal demand is a "Good Food Bill" establishing a legal framework for food policy, with targets covering childhood obesity, fruit and vegetable consumption, the proportion of produce grown domestically and household food insecurity. The letter notes that UK fruit and vegetable production has fallen 16% since 2015, leaving 78% of supply imported.
Such language is not new to Whitehall. The government's own National Security Assessment concluded earlier this year that global biodiversity loss poses a direct threat to the UK's food supply. Sir David Omand, the former GCHQ director, has described food as a "slow-burning" crisis, arguing that the national risk register's 89 entries are all acute emergencies and miss the slower threats that eventually catch fire. The food policy professor Tim Lang has said that other countries stockpile and retain flexibility, and that "what we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability". In 2022, the former MI5 director general Baroness Manningham-Buller told the NFU's Henry Plumb lecture that food formed part of critical national security.
The water picture underpins the agricultural one. Environment Agency figures for 24 to 30 July put national reservoir storage at 72%, about 9.5% below the long-term average, with irrigation reservoirs roughly 30% to 50% full where growers depend on stored water. The agency declared more than half of England in drought on 29 July, citing record-low rainfall and exceptionally high temperatures, and has already flagged the possibility of voluntary restrictions on abstraction licences if dry weather persists into August. The response is being handled as a nationally significant incident, coordinated with Defra and the Cabinet Office. Essex and Suffolk Water's temporary use bans began on 3 August, and amber heat-health alerts covered the Midlands, south-east and south-west into midweek.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Winter oilseed rape has delivered 3.9 t/ha, up 17%, on an area expanded by 30% to 316,000 hectares, the largest since 2023 — and the record-low projection holds even after that gain. The data is also provisional and thin: AHDB's figures derive from a 60-farm survey covering around 38,500 hectares, run by The Andersons Centre, and this is the first of four reports this season. The ECIU itself hedges that "even if yields are revised up, 2026 is now likely to be one of the five worst harvests since 1984" — which would place four of the five worst in the current decade.
Consumer prices, meanwhile, are not yet spiking. Grocery price inflation stood at 2.6% in the four weeks to 12 July, the lowest since December 2024 and a fifth consecutive month of easing. The ECIU's warning that food prices will be 50% higher by November is a cumulative measure against the start of the 2021 cost-of-living crisis, not an annual rate; ONS figures cited by the Food Foundation show food prices up 30.1% since April 2022. Fertiliser costs are around 40% higher than a year ago, pushed up by the conflict involving Iran, with one grower saying that "planning crops for next year is a total nightmare".
Retailers may absorb the shortfall through imports rather than price rises. Ben Aveling, a Northamptonshire farmer, predicted supermarkets would source cheaper produce abroad, leaving "less UK produce available and less being sold"; lettuce and broccoli are already being drawn from Spain and the Netherlands. Bradshaw's counter is that the climates of supplier countries are shifting too, and farmers across Europe have issued similar warnings about falling output.
Scientists have linked the conditions directly to climate change. World Weather Attribution found June's heatwave would have been impossible 50 years ago and that climate change was "unequivocally to blame". England recorded its warmest June on record, and the UK its second warmest, in a year that has seen four widespread heatwaves. In May, the Climate Change Committee published an eight-point adaptation plan costed at about £11bn a year, against an estimated £100bn annual cost of inaction by mid-century, warning that two-thirds of viable UK agricultural land could become unworkable and that flood risk in the Fens could rise sixteenfold.
Environmental damage is running below last year's level, with 95 confirmed drought or dry-weather incidents since January against 173 at the same point in 2025, though the Environment Agency notes fish-kill incidents are rising quickly and are likely undercounted. The Rivers Trust says many waterways are critically low, with the Thames at Reading at its lowest recorded level, and is calling for wetland restoration, tree planting and reduced abstraction.
The Environment Secretary, Emma Reynolds, has pointed to record water infrastructure investment including nine new reservoirs, and launched England's first long-term Farming Roadmap running to 2050. No fresh government response to the ECIU's harvest figures had been issued at the time of writing, and Defra has not said whether it accepts the £390m estimate or will consider tax relief for on-farm water storage.
Beyond the immediate shortfall, the industry's sharpest concern is the next cycle. Parched soils and depleted farm reservoirs threaten autumn drilling, meaning the 2027 harvest may already be compromised before the current one is finished. Mr Lancaster said repeated impacts were undermining farmers' capacity to plant next year's crop, and that farming was now the sector most exposed to climate change. AHDB will publish three further harvest reports this season, with Defra's final estimate due around January 2027.
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