Listen: Professor discusses impact of poor 2024 wheat harvest with BBC's Farming Today

17 October 2024

BBC Radio Four’s Farming Today programme has been looking at the 2024 wheat harvest this week – and the impact a year of bad weather has had.

DEFRA have estimated the harvest could be the second worst since records began in 1983, and so Farming today’s programme makers once again spoke with Harper Adams Professor of Crop Science Jim Monaghan about the impact that the weather has had this year.

He said: “It's certainly been a very bad one. It feels as bad as it was in 2020. And when you look at the statistics, that puts them as the two worst harvests for a long time.

“A bad harvest means the farmers can't get the crop that they hoped to get, and that means they won't get the income that they hoped to get - and we as consumers won't get the food that we'd hoped to get.”

The true impact of the year’s bad weather will depend on global factors, Professor Monaghan added.

He said: “The actual implications for us as customers will depend a lot on what happens on the other big areas of Australia, America, Canada. If they have bad years as well, then you've got shortages on top of shortages - and you see prices start to go up.

“It is a global commodity and if other areas are having good production numbers, then it's a double whammy for the UK farmers because they get world prices, but they have less yield.”

Professor Monaghan also believes that the impact of weather – both in the autumn and in the spring – will start feeding through into the way farmers prepare their crops for future harvests.

He added: “The challenge you have is that when you're looking to drill winter crops, you want to get them in in the autumn. And we've had a couple of wet autumns now which have been really difficult.

“And so you could say, right, well, how am I going to avoid that problem? Maybe I'll drill as soon as I can when I get the opportunity.

“But actually, we're being told drill later to try to avoid issues with blackgrass.

“Or you say, well, we'll go to spring crops. They are then much more susceptible to drought and are much more susceptible to the vagaries of the weather in the five months they've got to grow - so you start getting a more volatile yield coming off the spring crops.”