Farmer fears empty shelves

Royal Borough: Call for help as crop yields fall

A Royal Borough farmer has called on the Government to provide the agricultural industry with more supplies as they struggle to grow crops amid the UK’s scorching temperatures.

Colin Rayner, one of the directors of Rayner family farms in Horton, feared that empty supermarket shelves and rising food costs will be the result if ministers do not address the problem.

Farmers up and down the country have been battling low levels of rainfall and recordbreaking temperatures which have had a negative impact on their crop yields.

Colin said he has had to harvest crops much earlier than usual, with many not growing at all due to the harsh conditions. He said: “We are harvesting maize on August 15 and this is not normally harvested until October 1.

“Last year we harvested about 6,000 tonnes of maize, this year it was 1,000. Wheat yields were down 30 per cent and barley 20 per cent. That is a bit of a disaster for us. The whole of Europe has had a disastrous harvest.”

Another problem for farmers is increasing costs for products and supplies, mainly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other countries have banned exports to the UK, Colin added, due to their own food shortages.

“The drought has been very severe – worse than 1976,” he said. “We have got very low food reserves and some countries are now banning the export of food and fertiliser.

“If there is a shortage of wheat, we are going to run out of bread.”

He anticipated food stocks to be even worse than the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people panicbought products and shops struggled to order enough stock during the worst of the crisis.

He called on Whitehall to ensure farmers had all the resources they needed to continue food production.

“We have been farming for 500 years so we are used to having poor yields,” he said. “But I think the Government needs to wake up and have a minister for food security to make sure we’ve got enough food. It is all very worrying.”

Colin said his farm has also had to deal with three major fires which have destroyed crops and machinery, adding that the scorching temperatures have made it ‘very difficult’ for his staff to work.

Colin added: “We don’t want money from the Government. They need to ask the farmers to double their production of food – my first priority is we need to feed the nation. They need to give us the tools to do it.”

The Government’s Environment Secretary George Eustice MP said: “We are better prepared than ever before for these dry conditions, but many farmers are concerned about water supplies and the impact on their crops and livestock.

“We are therefore introducing temporary easements on agri-environment schemes to give them the flexibility to respond.”