I remember farming in the drought of 1976. This summer is different - and far worse

I was in Oxfordshire back in the 70s, and I remember seeing the deep cracks in the heavy clay soils, cracks big enough to put your foot in. But the fundamental difference between then and now is that this drought is being felt despite having just had one of our wettest winters. These days, we’re dealing with pure extremes - and as a farmer, dealing with extremes is the hardest thing.

Beef farmers wouldn’t normally bring out feed stocks if there’s grass in the fields, but farmers are already beginning to use their winter supplies. This will put pressure on prices for us and for the consumer.

When it comes to vegetables, we’re not seeing that quality and size in the supermarkets. You’re seeing much smaller potatoes, when it would normally be big healthy tubers. That’s a direct reflection of the extreme weather, because crops like potatoes rely on irrigation.

Now that the forecast is for rain, we may see the drought ease – but to be honest, we could have a September’s worth of rain, but it would still need weeks more to replenish the water table that our plants and crops rely on.

When the flash floods come, that’s when we’re trying to stop the topsoil from being washed away – once we lose our soils, that’s when our livelihoods go.

We can do things in the short term to anticipate heavy rainfall and help the ground soak it up. We can prepare the soil by using a slitting machine to open it up, just as you would aerate your garden. In the medium to long-term, we can rotate our crops to keep the soil healthy, with deep-rooted grasses doing a lot of the work. Things our forefathers probably did and took for granted.

For example, our farm is as brown as everybody’s thanks to this drought - apart from two green fields of herbal leys; plants which grow down deeper into the soil and bring fresh nutrients upwards, so they can cope with more extreme weather. That will help in drought as well as flood.

As a farmer, any change in your farming practice is generational. I’m encouraged to know the next generation is making real, serious changes. The younger generation are convincing dad and grandad that this needs to be done, even though in some places dad doesn’t want to change his ways.

The government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive will be up for applications again this autumn, and that’s where new methods and new types of crops will be able to be supported, so I do welcome the extra £50m that the government announced. We’ll need it. Funds are also available to help set up farming clusters to share best practice, like the one here in the Tamar Valley, where we can help by encouraging farmers to do more.

Whenever anyone asks me about regenerative farming, I say it’s a shift, not a movement. It’s something you might say is a no-brainer but people only do it when they see a working example.

We’re not alone; these extremes are affecting Central Europe and everywhere else we rely on for food when our supplies are short. They have their own shortages - and this ultimately means our prices will be higher.

For so many years, I suppose we have all paddled our own canoe and done our own thing. But because of the pressures that we’re now seeing, farmers have to work together.

There’s been a realisation that climate change is coming, and we ignore it at our peril.

We have to learn to survive.

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Martin Howlett’s family has been farming for four generations, and he currently runs a 113-hectare mixed family farm near Callington in East Cornwall. He is part of the Slow the Flow project, a group of 23 farms who are working together in the Tamar Valley to prevent soil erosion, boost biodiversity and reduce run-off from fields during floods.

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