All a bit of a disaster: Yorkshire farmer tells of heat and dry weather impact

Glasgow Times

6 hours ago

Angela Serino is the director of Beetle Bank Open Farm & Wild Sanctuary in York – a small, open, working farm where the public can visit the animals.
Beetle Bank – which has goats, pigs, alpacas and rabbits – grows its own hay on 10 acres of land to feed the animals all the way through the winter and until April when its farmers typically buy a few bales until the next hay cut.
The farm is open to the public and has adventure playgrounds for children (Beetle Bank Open Farm/PA)
But with Yorkshire experiencing one of its driest years on record, Ms Serino said Beetle Bank will not be able to operate as usual.
'This year we're expecting to have less than a quarter of the hay that we usually have,' she told the PA news agency.
'Nobody else seems interested around here but it's stressing me out big time because our animals are part of the system. You can't just be without them, and we can't be without food for them.'
She continued: 'It's going to mean more animals will have to go than usual.
'Winter's always a bad time for us because we have very little income coming in and now we'll have a massive, massive food bill to find the money for as well because we'll have to feed our animals hard food and hope that there's plenty of that about.'
Beetle Bank usually produces around 50 to 70 big bales of hay a year.
'I'm not expecting to have more than about 10 this year looking at the fields,' Ms Serino said.
'That's a couple of thousands of pounds down the drain before you get going never mind the feed that you have to buy in to replace that.'
Visitors can feed and pet Beetle Bank's farm animals (Beetle Bank Open Farm/PA)
The farm director has been in contact with other farmers in the area who have told her they will have 'very little' hay for sale this year.
She told PA that Beetle Bank is looking into an irrigation system to mitigate the impact from dry and hot weather if the same conditions return next year.
Ms Serino said: 'Strangely enough I've been thinking about it all spring – this spring when it was really hot and dry, and I was thinking should I go out, should I buy a water canon of some description and you just think that this is Britain and it will change.
'You don't want to spend £5,000 on some sort of water system that sprinkles the fields when you don't have to and at the end of the day I should have just gone and done it then I wouldn't be in the state I'm in today.
'It's all a bit of a disaster to be honest.
Beetle Bank's farmers will have to try and buy hard food for their animals Beetle Bank Open Farm/PA)
'I don't remember being stressed about the winter in the summer before, except for 2019 where it poured with rain from the middle of middle of May until, god, I think February.'
Ms Serino is not currently getting any support from the Government, saying it 'doesn't care about farming'.
'In an ideal world, they could go around and give us all a grant for the machinery we need to make what we need,' she said.
'There was a grant going not long ago but it's so difficult to actually apply for these things. There's so many hoops you've got to jump through to actually get something and you have to match the funding.
'Well, if you don't have any money it's very difficult to match funding.
'It's difficult times, and farming is not good.'
Besides the issues with hay yields, Ms Serino said the farm has used 'an awful lot more water than usual' this year and has struggled to put up fencing it needed because the ground is 'like a rock'.
The hot weather has also impacted revenue from visitors.
'Today and yesterday, we've only half the customers we should have because they don't like this weather,' Ms Serino told PA.
The farm needs rain (Beetle Bank Open Farm/PA)
'So when it gets this hot, it has an effect on your revenue as well as your costs.
'We are way down on revenue today. This will be one of the worst Saturdays we've had in a long time.'
She said the climate has gone 'completely upside down inside out' in the last five or six years.
'I just sort of saw it coming, but not properly,' she said. 'I saw something coming but not the actual extent that it is until you're sat on the doorstep with it.
'It's difficult to predict but I didn't really predict that you'd have months and months of no rain.
'I mean, every week you look at the weather and it says rain. I look on my phone now and it says it's raining Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and it just doesn't rain.'
Yorkshire and north-east England has seen an average of just 242.8mm of rain so far in 2025 – less than half the amount that had fallen by this stage last year (542.3mm).
Cumulative rainfall so far this year is the lowest for this part of the country since 1959, when 238.1mm had fallen by July 9.