Essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian is calling climate doomsday over a few withered grape vines and a failing organic farm.
It’s too fast, too big’: speed of climate crisis is devastating crops, say farmers
Drought and extreme heat are killing plants, driving up prices while also making some farms economically unviable
Pippa Neill Fri 31 Jul 2026 21.00 AEST
t’s a constant battle,” says Tim Young. He and his family have been tracking the rainfall on their Norfolk farm since 1976, and the data shows the last six years have seen two-thirds the amount of rain compared with previous years. The lack of water has become the number one risk to Young’s business.
This summer has seen record-breaking climate induced heatwaves scorch much of Europe, which combined with droughts and “apocalyptic” wildfireshas made farming virtually impossible. France has faced down fires that its president, Emmanuel Macron, called the worst since the second world war and on Wednesday half of England was declared officially in drought, with July expected to be the driest on record after winter floods, according to the Environment Agency. So how are farmers bearing up under the pressure?
“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”
Do took over the farm in 2018 and adopted organic farming practices in the hope to build resilience against the climate crisis. But with the climate changing much faster than most predicted, Do says her farm is just not able to adapt quickly enough. “It’s too fast. It’s too big,” she says.
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Prof Pete Falloon, the Met Office’s science lead on food security, who is advising the government on the resilience of our food systems, says a movement to more regenerative approaches, better flood management, water storage and using crop varieties that are more heat or drought tolerant is essential.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/speed-of-climate-crisis-devastating-crops-say-farmers
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There’a a bit to unpack here.
Winter saw floods, but Summer is dry and the farmers have no water for their crops.
I’m pretty sure there is this thing, a reservoir, which can collect water when it rains, then allow that water to be used when the rain stops. Unfortunately Britain doesn’t have enough of them.
Running Dry: How the UK Can Reverse Decades of Underinvestment in Reservoirs
- bluechain
- Mar 18, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: May 19, 2025
The UK’s reservoir infrastructure has seen minimal investment in recent decades. The last significant construction being the Banbury Flood Storage Area, completed in 2012 and you have to go back another two decades to the construction of the Carsington reservoir in 1992 for the previous investment in storage capacity in the UK. This stagnation is concerning, especially considering the National Infrastructure Commission’s projection of a daily supply-demand gap of four billion litres by 2050.
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Read more: https://www.bluechainconsulting.com/post/running-dry-how-the-uk-can-reverse-decades-of-underinvestment-in-reservoirs
Maybe if the British Government stopped wasting so much money on net zero, they’d be able to address chronic water storage capacity issues.
As for adopting organic farming practices to make the farm more resilient, I’ll leave readers to comment on that absurdity. I’d love to know what the nutrient levels were in that soil which can’t grow crops.
Back in the real world, away from backwards places which place climate zealotry ahead of taking care of food production, crop yields are doing just fine.
But you know, if climate change was no threat to food production the climate zealots wouldn’t have anything to scare people with, so they clutch at straws, play emotional anecdotes rather than big picture facts. And sadly, some of their audience is still falling for their nonsense.
