At six o’clock on a Sunday morning I was standing in what used to be my lawn, picking a bowl of gray water over the hydrangea like a witness. The pipeline has just been closed. The water tank ran out in May. The grass itself is now the color and texture of the digestive biscuit.
Everyone of a certain age says the same thing: this is 1976 again. Waterfalls on the road, snakes in Bible-sized numbers, and the government went wild and appointed a real Drought Minister, when it rained fast for a month. We went through it because it was a strange thing. It has stopped being a mess.
The Met Office spent June marking fifty years since the famous summer of 1976, still the hottest and sunniest on record, with its highest temperature now beaten on six days in the past decade. Meanwhile the Environment Agency’s latest report reads like the first chapter of a disaster novel: five water companies set to block water pipes, below-average ponds, and 729 different restrictions on farmers’ withdrawal licenses while water stores water in winter and East Anglian livestock men run out of food in July.
My grass will recover. The people who raise your dinner may not see it.
Consider Jeremy Clarkson, the most popular British farmer on television. He says last year’s hot summer gave him the second worst harvest in living memory, with yields down 40 percent, and he admits Diddly Squat won’t make money on wheat and barley. Read that again. A man with an Amazon contract, a farm store, a bar and a few million viewers can’t make a real farming part of his farm income. Imagine a farm three miles down the road with the same weather, same costs and no cameras.
And what is the government’s big plan for these people? There’s no drought fund, no name-calling irrigation scheme, no serious word about food security from the Treasury that can always get a few billion under the sofa for something shiny. More and more, the plan is to pay them to quit.
It’s as if Rolls-Royce has hit the jackpot and its biggest customer, rather than ordering engines, has given a grant to let wildflowers grow on the assembly line. Not as a side line. As a business. The ropes are quiet, the students retrain themselves as rangers, the annual report is called A Celebration of Grasses. Everyone applauds the diversity of nature, until the day comes when the world needs an engine.
That is not a wild caricature of rural policy. Under sustainable farming systems, the state pays very well per hectare for margins with rich flowers, herbal leys and newly planted trees, while the market pays a price for wheat that often fails to cover the cost of growing wheat. The Government’s own analysis of food security admits that if all land use and climate policy were fully implemented, almost a quarter of our agricultural land would be diverted from food production.
Business students will recognize this disease right away, because it is not farming at all. It is about price signals. If the non-production subsidy exceeds the production limit, any rational operator stops production. You don’t need a conspiracy; spreadsheet we will do. Farmers don’t sow wildflower meadows because they have become soft. They plant themselves because they are the only crops in Britain that have a guaranteed buyer.
Which brings us, of course, to Rachel Reeves. The farm income statement was already ruined due to the weather. The Chancellor then followed the balance sheet, with a 20 per cent inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1 million, not to be moved by the bulldozers of Whitehall and analysis revealed that this raid could cost the Treasury £2 billion. Drought is a natural nail in the coffin of a family farm. The tractor tax is a man-made, and deliberately driven tax.
The bill rests with all of us. Traders report that hot weather is already driving up food prices as domestic harvests dwindle, and peers have warned that the taps could run dry by mid-century without major investment. Food security is infrastructure, just like roads and dams. We would never pay Heathrow to grow moss on their runways and be surprised when nothing comes of it.
In 1976 we dug because the rains came back and the farming was still stubborn, melted and everywhere. In 2026 the rain will finally return. Farmers, once they’re gone, won’t.
At that time I will go out in the morning with my washing bowl, keeping one hydrangea alive in the dead brown garden. It’s decorative, it doesn’t produce anything, and it lives completely on offer. I decided to call it British agricultural policy.
