Low Spring Rainfall is Prompting Fears for UK Grain Crops After Last Year's Problems in Russia

Copyright (c) 2011 Alison Withers

Last summer world grain crops were depleted because of episodes of extreme weather including drought in Russia and Ukraine and unusually wet weather in Canada.

Following its drought Russia had already imposed an export ban on its wheat for 2011, a significant amount since the country is the world's fourth largest wheat producer.

Now the focus of attention has shifted to the UK, where six weeks of unusually dry spring weather have led to predictions of dramatically lower grain yields and a crisis meeting between DEFRA (Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the farmers' union the NFU, the Environment Agency, Natural England, Water UK and the UK Irrigation Association (UKIA).

According to DEFRA soil moisture is at levels usually seen at the start of June and many rivers are experiencing exceptionally low flows, which is beginning to have an impact on farms that rely on using river water to irrigate their crops.

Recently the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has issued another report on lost and wasted food, calculating that it is at an annual global total of 1.3bn tonnes.

It found that consumers are the primary cause of food waste in industrialized and developed countries but in the developing world poor infrastructure including poor storage, packaging and processing facilities with inadequate abilities to keep food fresh are the main issue.

All this is taking place in a situation where wheat, soya and maize prices have risen to levels last seen in 2008, when there were food riots in many parts of the world and the world's farmers are under intense pressure to improve their crop yields to ensure adequate food supplies for the predicted growth in the world's population.

At the same time environmentalists and consumers continue to put pressure on food chains and through them on farmers to produce healthier foods free of chemical residues and to farm in a sustainable way to protect the environment. But it goes without saying that consumers also want food to remain cheap!

This all puts farmers in an almost impossible situation. Plainly water is essential for crops to grow, although DEFRA is not saying yet that the UK faces a dramatic loss of crops, whose yields can be affected by many factors, of which water is only one.

More and more mainstream farmers are joining the organic and small farmers using a variety of means to protect their crop yields and farm sustainably. Governments, too, are assessing the older generation of synthetically produced pesticides and fertilizers. In the EU, for example, 600 of 1000 registered pesticide active ingredients have been de-listed recently, leaving farmers with fewer options but equally with an incentive to farm more innovatively.

Crops can be protected by planting cover crops that ripen earlier, such as rape, with wheat, to provide some protection to wheat seedlings in their early stages of growth. Also more low-chem agricultural products derived from natural plant sources are becoming available. The demand for products such as biopesticides, biofungicides and natural yield enhancers is reported to be growing among conventional farmers, accounting for 97% of its sales, according to one biopesticides developer. These new products can also be used to reduce the amounts and rates of synthetic and mineral pesticides that are not banned.

Plainly, there is progress in changing farming methods but there still remains a great deal to be done.


------

Biopesticides are a tool that can help farmers, who are coming under increasing pressure from both natural causes such as changing rainfall patterns and droughts and consumer demands for more natural, healthy but still cheap foods. By Ali Withers.