At six o’clock on Sunday morning I was standing on what used to be my lawn, decanting a washing-up bowl of gray water onto a hydrangea like a man disposing of evidence. 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. Standpipes in the street, ladybirds in biblical quantities, and a government so rattled it appointed an actual Minister for Drought, whereupon it promptly rained for a month. We went through it because it was a strange thing. It has stopped being a mess.
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 scorched summer gave him the second worst harvest in living memory, with yields down as much as 40 percent, and he has admitted that Diddly Squat will not 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 is no drought fund, no irrigation strategy worth the name, no serious word about food security from a Treasury that can always find a few billion down the sofa for something shinier. More and more, the plan is to pay them to quit.
It is as if Rolls-Royce had hit a rough patch and its biggest customer, rather than ordering engines, offered a stipend to let wildflowers grow through 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 the sustainable farming schemes, the state pays handsomely per hectare for flower-rich margins, herbal leys and freshly planted trees, while the market pays a wheat price that frequently fails to cover the cost of growing wheat. The Government’s own food security analysis concedes that if every land-use and climate policy were enacted in full, almost a quarter of our farmland could come out of 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 went after the balance sheet, with her 20 per cent inheritance levy on farms worth over £1 million, unmoved by the tractors on Whitehall and by analysis suggesting the raid could end up costing 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. Retailers report that hot weather is already pushing food prices up as domestic yields shrivel, and peers have warned that taps could run dry by mid-century without serious investment. Food security is infrastructure, much 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.
