Across the South East, prolonged droughts and scorching temperatures are stressing traditional English fruit, depleting winter cattle feed, and slashing grain harvests by up to 40 percent. Farmers are gambling against the weather, desperate for a wetter year to salvage their livelihoods, secure the nation’s food supply, and avoid a surge in food imports. The sensory reality of the heat is visceral—from the smell of parched earth to the sight of withered orchards.
Heatwave Farming: Apple Sunburn and Clay Suncream
Clive Baxter manages about 200 acres (81 hectares) of fruit trees at Amsbury Farm near Maidstone. He notes that everything is suffering in the heatwaves. Traditional English varieties like Bramley apples and Coxes simply do not handle hot weather well. The delicate balance of these heritage fruits is being upended by sustained high temperatures.
“Once the temperature gets to 30 degrees and above, if there is no wind, the juice starts to boil in the apples and cooks the fruit,” Baxter explains. When this happens, the fruit loses all commercial value, rotting from the inside out. “Bramley apples are very susceptible to sunburn so we are spraying them with a clay substance that acts like suncream,” he notes. This fine clay reflects the harsh sunlight away from the delicate skin. The extreme heat has also forced them to thin the stressed trees, a desperate measure that results in lower yields and noticeably smaller apples this season.
UK Agriculture Faces Dwindling Grass and Winter Feed
The severe lack of rain is hitting livestock just as hard. Nellie Budd, a cattle farmer in Brockham, Surrey, keeps 247 cows. Her biggest worry during the heatwaves is finding enough food to sustain her herd. The region has seen 47 consecutive days without a drop of rain.
Grass normally proves resilient, regenerating after cutting for hay or silage. This year, the heat offered no let-up, baking the soil and stalling growth. Budd is now feeding her cattle hay, which is their designated winter food supply. With limited nutrition, the cattle are simply not growing large enough for beef production. Reducing the herd is not an option, as her family could not afford to live on less. She attempted to put an overlay in her grasslands to help retain moisture, but the ground was too dry to do anything. “Everything is a gamble for farmers and we just hope weather patterns cause a wetter year next year,” she says.
Crop Yields Plunge Without Irrigation Options
Arable farmer Peter Knight is currently harvesting about 2,000 acres (809 hectares) at Woolgars Farm in West Horsley. The problems started during the first heatwave in May. Spring barley, a key ingredient for making beer, was planted in March and has seen very little rain since.
The crops flower in early June, but the intense heat puts them under immediate stress, impacting the final yield. Knight notes there was no rain throughout the entire grain-filling period. He is deeply concerned because three out of the last five years have featured similar drought-like conditions. “Trying to manage our way through that is very difficult,” Knight said. Irrigation is not a feasible option for arable farmers due to the massive scale involved; watering thousands of acres of grain is logistically and economically impossible.
To adapt, Knight is sowing earlier in the spring and performing less cultivation to help preserve soil moisture. Despite these best efforts, crop yields are reduced by around 30 to 40 percent compared to a normal year. The compounding effect of repeated hot years is making traditional farming methods obsolete.
What Happens Next
If these heatwave farming conditions continue to disrupt UK agriculture, the country will likely end up importing significantly more food. The recurring drought patterns over the past five years suggest this is not an isolated crisis but a shifting climate baseline. Farmers will need broader systemic support, from advanced drought-resistant crop varieties to large-scale water management infrastructure, to secure the domestic food supply and reduce reliance on food imports. The era of predictable English weather is over, and the agricultural sector must evolve rapidly to survive the boiling summers ahead.
— Isabella Morales, food desk, AXO News