Brambles early, 'catastrophic' harvests. Was nature always like this?

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

I grew up on a farm and I remember the way the weather featured in our lives. Anxiety was always there about the comings and goings of rains and sun – the frosts, the winds, the aberrations from what we felt should be, alongside with the recognition that there was no perfect and reliable pattern of the year.
I don't live on a farm now, nor even in the countryside, and I've been removed for long enough not to know at first hand how those aberrations have changed. I've not even been gardening this year, but a gardening friend tells me that everything is two weeks early.
And, well, yes, there have always been years that play out like that, in which berries are early, or berries are late, or the brambles turn to squish before you can even stuff one in your mouth.
But the worry is about something bigger than that. In England, according to Kathryn Brown, the director of climate change and evidence at the Wildlife Trusts, the trees are dropping leaves early due to stress, and there is a risk that wildlife will not have the food it needs later in the season.
Last week, Jeremy Clarkson was declaring on X, 'It looks like this year's harvest will be catastrophic. That should be a worry for anyone who eats food.' (Now and again, I wonder if the nation's one-time favourite petrolhead could turn into a treasured environmentalist and this gives me hope.)
Meanwhile, in the United States right now, North Carolina has been swept by Hurricane Erin, which is weakening and heading our way, promising not destruction but rain and an end to the dry spell. My thoughts, though, are for the farmers the other side of the Atlantic, and, in particular, a North Carolina devastated by flooding only last year by Helene.
One 2024 article on those NC farmers, quoted Sandi Kronick, CEO of Happy Dirt, an organic distribution service, saying, 'Many farmers that I work with have said they used to think they needed to budget for a bad season every seven years and now it's really every three years. But even then, being financially prepared for a bad season is one thing.
'Nobody budgets for what Helene just did to farms in western North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. The scale of Helene is not something that any farm would ever think to plan for.'
Was last year an aberration, a new norm, or something that has always come and gone?
One aberration, or shift, in Scotland is that this year, according to latest reports, the spring barley harvest in Scotland is coming in two weeks earlier than usual. This doesn't sound like a bad thing, until one learns that NFU Scotland has said that growing cereal crops in Scotland has become increasingly "unpredictable and difficult". Or that this year's unusual weather – a dry spring and then further dry weather later - has also adversely affected the quality of the grain.
Broccoli farmers in England, meanwhile, are struggling, with yields in some parts cut by more than half.
This comes in the wake of last year's summer, which some Scottish farmers, contributing to an NFU Scotland survey, said resulted in the toughest harvest in 30 years. England suffered its worst harvest on record, partly caused by heavy rainfall, which barraged some areas with more than 300 per cent of the average rainfall in September and saw wheat harvest down an estimated 22 per cent.
Of course, we live in an interconnected world, and, since the UK imports a giant 40 percent of its food, according to the UK Food Security Index 2024, what happens in terms of global politics and climate, across the rest of the world, impacts us. Last year, for instance, the Spanish government put in place an export ban on vegetables during flooding in Valencia last year.
A report titled 'Climate change impacts on food and migration' recently published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, showed that £3bn of UK food imports, from rice and tea to mangoes, are from the top 20 counties for internally displaced people due to extreme weather.
Pakistan is our second biggest supplier of rice. In 2022 it was hit by both floods and debilitating heat and in 2023, it had the second highest number of people internally displaced by disaster anywhere in the world, at 1.2 million. From 2022 to 2023, the average price the UK paid per kilo for Pakistani rice rose by a third.
We in the UK are the lucky ones - we came ninth in the most recent (2022) Global Index of Food Security. Just last autumn, the World Food Programme warned that millions of people across southern Africa were facing the worst hunger crisis in the region in decades.
Last year, the UK Government published an assessment of the threats facing UK Food Security. It stated: 'Long term decline in the UK's natural capital is a pressing risk to UK food production.' But it also reminded us: 'Climate change, nature loss and water insecurity pose significant risks to the ability of global food production to meet demand over the longer term.'
There were bad harvest years and good years in my farming childhood – and ultimately the farm went bankrupt, though family tales about how it went wrong never mentioned the weather. Farming has never been easy. But looking back to those times, something I reflect upon now is that it may be that we were, and had been for a long time, living in a period of relative climate certainty that may now be breaking down.
This is something Professor Johan Rockström, the man behind the planetary boundaries framework - essentially the idea that the health of the Earth can be assessed through nine categories 0 highlighted to me in a conversation earlier this year.
Rockström, who is head of the pioneering Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and, also knows his agriculture. It's what he studied before he became, and one of the things he described is how agriculture developed in what's called the Holocene, and there's a reason for that, it 'wasn't a coincidence'.
Winds of change on climate and farming (Image: Derek McArthur)
We began planting because the grasslands and the forest systems had settled down. 'They were stable," he said. "And every year human beings could see, for instance, 'Isn't this interesting, come mid-May, and temperatures are above 10°C every year, and they stay warm until end of September.'
"Or if they were on the Savannah, they could say, 'Well, it starts raining in June every year, and then it seems to rain every year roughly, 25 times up until October, and it does that every year, every year, every year, every year. This was probably exactly what made these humans dare to take the risk of investing in planting seed. It was worth it.'
What he also tells is a story of how we were sitting quite comfortably planting our seeds in the Holocene, when something happened which took that stability off course. As he put it: 'When we enter the Holocene, we have reached a point where the size of the rainforests the size of the boreal forest, the size of the temperate forest, the wetlands, the peatlands, the green and ice sheet, Antarctica, the ocean biology, biological pump, the ocean heat conveyor, belt, have all reached a point where the net income of energy equals the net export of energy.
"So the system is in balance - and it stays there. It has finally reached an equilibrium and there it gets stuck, until one day when we start burning coal in the UK and the industrial revolution starts.'
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From that moment, he observed, we began to cause an energy imbalance. 'All the planetary boundary transgressions on fresh water, on nitrogen, on phosphorus and biodiversity on carbon, all translate to causing an energy imbalance. We get more Watts per square meter staying in the planet than we release back to space. And this is what kicks us off into the journey that we today call the climate crisis.'
Many farmers will no doubt have good harvests this year, and that should be celebrated. But the bigger question is whether the pattern is shifting and how that will affect farming in Scotland.
One thing we can be sure of is that farmers are going to have to play a crucial role in both adapting to and, since agriculture contributes an estimated 12% to the nation's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. mitigating climate change. But they need to be fully supported to do so.
What is also worth remembering is that if we tackle climate change without biodiversity we will fail on climate change - mainly because the carbon sink of nature will increasingly fail. That's certainly what Rockström observes. 'Nature boundaries," he observes, "will on their own kick the planet beyond 1.5 degrees."
This may sound alarmist, but bear in mind, this is a scientist right at the heart of all the converging strands of data.
I sometimes think of the generations of Holocene tenant farmers and rural labourers that thread back through my family tree and wonder what weather and wildlife they saw - as well as what my city-dwelling sons will see.
My father now has Parkinson's and while he partly lives in a Lewy body world of tractors and cattle, his hands dancing out the motions of driving a tractor or petting a sheepdog, I feel his knowledge and sense of it is already lost.
That world seems, for me, increasingly unreachable, forgotten in the slow slide of a changing baseline and decades of urban living. We do not know what we have lost, or might have had.
Though not so long ago my dad did suggest to me things he might do differently were he farming now. One of them was surprisingly radical. Not to plough.