‘£100k harvest is gone and home is now an island’
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 last year when Storm Babet flooded the Barlings Eau river in two places.
The waters surged more than a metre over its barriers following the 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 farmland near Bardney, Lincs, remains inaccessible on foot.
When the initial deluge happened, he 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 any more crops in the same area – a loss that will cost him £100,000 if he grows nothing this year.
His farmhouse has sat on a thin strip of land surrounded by murky waters for the past six months after the deluge destroyed his valuable wheat, rapeseed and vining crops.
The still-submerged fields have been rendered “worthless”. With a mile of riverbank left “substandard”, he said he “cannot risk planting crops on this land again”.
There is also the looming prospect of further flooding despite repairs paid for by the Environment Agency.
The EA – sponsored by the Department for Environment – spent £3.5million plugging riverbank breaches during a previous occasion when his land flooded in 2019.And it pledged a further £450,000 for temporary repairs following last year’s rains.
But Mr Ward believes that 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.
“I’m a farmer and am not going to have a harvest this year – it’s obviously a huge worry.”
And he warns he is far from the only farmer to have lost out significantly following Storm Babet.