Britain's 'exceptionally serious' drought tests a country famous for its rain

Britain's 'exceptionally serious' drought tests a country famous for its rain

Lack of rain over half of England and all Wales exposes struggle with water shortages

Standing in a field on his southern England farm, James Baird pointed to the ground where the earth had split into deep fissures.

"You'd lose your arm down some of these cracks," Baird, a "nature friendly" crop farmer in West Sussex, said Tuesday.

Baird, 56, has farmed for four decades, but he said he's never seen a summer like this one. His cereal harvest finished weeks earlier than usual. Crop yields at his farm, Stroodelande, are down 25 per cent.

"Most people would think, 'Oh, well, the U.K. is such a rainy place' … we're kind of famous for it."

But in the past five years, the country has seen successive droughts, making it "difficult to deny patterns are emerging," Baird said. "This is by far the the driest summer that I've farmed in."

What is normally, by early August, a country defined by its lush countryside and patchwork of emerald fields has become parched after successive heat waves and weeks without rain.

Half of England and all of Wales are officially in drought after what the United Kingdom's Environment Agency described last week as an "exceptionally serious" dry spell. In July, England received just seven per cent of its average rainfall for the month. Southern England received one per cent, with just 0.7 millimetres of rainfall.

Britain is famous for drizzle, with its moody climate and an average of 135 precipitation days a year long considered a defining trait.

"We're known as a temperate climate ... England's green and pleasant land," said Oxford dairy farmer David Christensen, quoting a well-known line from the William Blake poem And did those feet in ancient time that was popularized by Hubert Parry's hymn Jerusalem.

"But we may have to change our techniques."

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This year's drought has not only called into question English ways of life, but has also renewed concerns over Britain's long-term water security.

The Environment Agency and water companies have estimated that by 2050 England faces a water supply shortfall of five billion litres a day. It has also prompted fears over possible food shortages the National Farmers' Union has warned could be on the horizon.

The prolonged heat has scorched crops, shrunk rivers and canals and fuelled wildfires. More than 20 million people (roughly a quarter of the population of England and Wales) are under hosepipe bans — where water companies impose restrictions on the use of garden hoses, sprinklers and other similar watering devices with steep fines if broken.

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The drought has also brought another danger for farmers.

On July 19, Eleanor Gilbert was harvesting grain with her stepfather at Rookery Farm in Hampshire when she spotted flames in a neighbouring field.

The pair grabbed fire extinguishers and raced toward the fire. When that wasn't enough, they climbed back into the combine and began cutting around the flames to create a firebreak before firefighters arrived.

"It's almost becoming a new normal with this dry weather," Gilbert said of fires threatening farmland.

Across England and Wales, firefighters responded to nearly 400 wildfires in July, making it the busiest month on record, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council.

"We've had this triple whammy," said Claire Barnes, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London and a member of World Weather Attribution.

Record-breaking heat and dry spring leave parts of England without water

Extreme heat has dried vegetation across much of Western Europe, she said, creating ideal conditions for wildfire.

"There's a really clear causal chain going from heat to drying to flammability," Barnes said. "Then it only takes a spark."

Gilbert, 24, said the increasingly difficult seasons are making her question her future in farming.

"I absolutely love it. It's my favourite thing ever."

But rising costs and the stress she sees her stepfather go through have made her question how she'll pay off her 80,000-pound ($150,000 Cdn) student debt, said Gilbert, who also runs a pumpkin patch and posts about life on the farm online as Berkshire Farm Girl.

"I do need to think carefully about what's coming."

Many, including Gilbert and her stepfather, and Baird, are trying to adapt by adding organic matter to their soils so they retain more moisture.

Christensen, of Kingston Hill Farm in Oxford, said he is shifting from planting maize to wheat, which doesn't grow as quickly but is more hardy.

"What we're doing at the moment is replacing efficiency with resilience."

Christensen said his cows are producing less milk this year, too, because of the stress of the heat and lack of grass to graze.

The wetter winters are also taking a toll on them. Last winter, they were hit by a strain of pneumonia, which Christensen said was "a first for us in 58 years." He is introducing vaccines for bluetongue and pneumonia, previously unseen diseases for his farm's herd.

Water companies, which oversee Britain's water management, plan to build 10 reservoirs in England, but the first are not expected to come online until the early 2030s.

At the same time, critics have questioned government proposals for dozens of new data centres, which require significant amounts of water for cooling.

"It's baffling when you're being told to save water, save water, but then the government are putting through all of these data centres that are going to use so much water," said Charlotte Bownass, who lives on a wide-beam houseboat on London's canals with her partner and their seven-month-old baby.

Low water levels in canals and rivers

The drought is reshaping more than Britain's farms, with low water levels forcing closures in some parts of the country's vast, 200-year-old network of inland waterways many now call home.

Bownass said her family chose to live on the boat for its affordability and tranquility, but she worries what wetter winters, which have caused canal breaches, and dryer summers will mean for that lifestyle. Their boat has already been stuck a few times.

"It's just quite scary, these two extremes," she said.

Outside London, many people holiday on the narrowboats that navigate canals and rivers that were used to transport coal before railroads.

For Nici Griffin and her partner, Sharon Bull, who are cheesemongers travelling between markets on their narrowboat, the Three Sheep Cheese Boat, a journey north from Linsdale to Birmingham this week was complicated by several canal and lock closures.

"We're having to take a completely different route than we would have done," Griffin said after a long navigation day Tuesday, when the couple had came across an unusual sighting: a cow drinking from the low water.

But Griffin, in true British fashion, said she's not too fussed about the changing conditions.

"We're boaters, so we just get on with it."

Verity is a reporter for CBC in Montreal. She previously worked for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal.