This summer’s drought shows why supporting England’s farmers in the right way matters

England’s farming system has moved away from area-based subsidies towards payments for public goods, like flood mitigation and improved air quality. The hardships faced by farmers this summer show why this transition is so important for national security and farm profitability.

The prime minister’s recent announcement of a £50 million uplift for the Sustainable Farming Incentive was presented as a response to the pressures on farmers. But this wasn’t actually new money. Moving funding from one part of the existing farming budget to another may help some farmers in the short term, but it doesn’t answer the bigger question raised by this summer’s drought: whether England is investing enough to help farming become more resilient to a hotter, drier and less predictable climate.

This summer’s extreme heat has provided a stark reminder that English agriculture is already living with climate change. Across much of the country, farmers have faced prolonged dry conditions, repeated heatwaves and increasing pressure on water supplies. By late July, seven regions of England had entered drought status, and England has now experienced drought in three of the past five years.

For farmers, that means lower yields at a time of high input costs and growing uncertainty about what future harvests will look like. For the government, it should sharpen the test for its agricultural policy: is the transition preparing the sector for what’s coming?

As the impacts of climate change accelerate, farming policy will increasingly be judged not only by the environmental outcomes it delivers, but by whether it helps farm businesses develop greater resilience to more frequent droughts, floods and heatwaves.

Policy should support more adaptation But resilience won’t happen automatically. It requires investment, innovation and a clear plan for rolling out adaptation measures across the farming sector.

Plant breeders are already developing crop varieties that are better able to cope with drought, heat and increasingly variable weather. Precision technologies can help farmers use fertilisers, pesticides and water more efficiently, reducing costs while making production less vulnerable to extreme conditions. On-farm reservoirs can store water from wetter periods for use during droughts, helping to reduce pressure on rivers when water is most scarce. Livestock farmers may also need greater use of housing, shade and shelter to protect animals during periods of extreme heat.

Adaptation is not only about what happens within a farm’s boundaries. It’s also about managing entire landscapes. Restoring wetlands, increasing tree cover, rebuilding soil health and creating features that slow the movement of water through catchments can help the land retain more water during wet periods and release it gradually during dry weather.

The challenge isn’t a lack of solutions but how to deploy them at sufficient scale and speed. The good news is that these are exactly the sorts of measures that the government’s Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme finances, and which the Land Use Framework promised to support through a spatially targeted approach to drive funding into the areas where it can make the most difference.

Resilience needs investment, not a return to direct payments Some will argue that the pressures exposed by this summer’s drought make the case for returning to the EU-style direct payments to farmers. But payments that do nothing to build resilience would only leave farmers more exposed to future shocks. Untargeted area-based subsidies wouldn’t help the adoption of precision irrigation, on-farm water storage or landscape-scale measures that help land hold more water.

Instead, under the new system, payments support farmers to take up those practices and build resilience in their production and their income. But this progress needs to be faster and more ambitious. Agricultural policy must offer stronger incentives and sufficient funding to deploy changes quickly and at scale.

That’s why the size of the farming budget matters. It is currently too small to deliver the environmental outcomes expected of it. With the necessity of climate adaptation now part of the picture, increasing this budget should be seen as an investment in national security. Moving money around within the existing ELM budget may be understandable in the short term, but it risks leaving other essential work underfunded, including the mitigation measures needed to prevent worsening climate change.

Funding needs to help farmers cope It would be easy to view this summer as an exceptional year. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Climate projections indicate that England is likely to experience hotter, drier summers and more frequent agricultural droughts in the decades ahead, putting growing pressure on agriculture.

If England is likely to experience more summers like 2026, the transition in how agriculture is supported will be essential to accelerate changes that will allow farming