"We're looking at a 30 percent reduction in our good fields, in some of our poor fields it's even more," said Matt Culley, a farmer from Hampshire and chairperson of the National Farmers' Union (NFU). The federation said only 40 percent of the usual amount of wheat crop was planted last October due to heavy downpours.
Severe weather continued to hit the agricultural sector this year as droughts earlier in the season affected the quality of crops being harvested now. The dry spells were followed by lots of August rains, resulting in poor quality harvests. Cirencester farmer Ed Horton said his crops usually yield around 2 500 tonnes of wheat, but this year, his crops are down to 580 tonnes. "It has a huge knock-on effect on our finances," he told Sky News.
"We've produced a third of what we usually would, therefore there's a large hole in our cash flow and we've had to replace wheat with other crops that we don't make as much money out of." "For the food chain, there's a lack of domestically produced quality wheat so we may end up having to import wheat from other parts of the world." -Full Report
