England Had 8 Percent of Its Normal July Rain. Now Come the Bills.

Droughts are usually discussed as a weather story, which is why they are usually discussed too late. The economic consequence arrives months after the dry spell, in a shop, attached to a price.

England recorded 5.6mm of rain in July, around 8 percent of the long term monthly average, making it likely the driest July since records began. That is not a dry month. That is an absence of one.

What farmers are actually reporting

The National Farmers' Union has been specific rather than atmospheric about it. NFU president Tom Bradshaw described wheat and oat yields this year as very, very poor, and said livestock farmers have been forced into their winter feed rations because grass simply has not grown.

That second detail is the one to sit with. Winter feed exists to get animals through winter. Using it in August means buying more later, at whatever price it costs by then.

Vegetable growers face a different squeeze. As reporting on the union's warning sets out, they are running low on irrigation water, which reduces how much food is produced domestically and raises the cost of producing it.

Why one bad summer becomes a multi year problem

British agriculture went into this from a waterlogged winter, and the combination is what makes it unusual. Fields too wet to plant, followed by fields too dry to grow.

Farming groups are no longer describing this as bad luck. It is the third drought in five years, and the language coming from the sector treats it as the new operating condition rather than an outlier to be endured.

The Gulf News account of the spring drought, the worst in nearly seventy years, gives a sense of how long this has been building.

What it means for prices

Domestic shortfalls do not usually empty shelves in a country that imports as much as Britain does. They change what is on them and what it costs, because the gap gets filled from abroad at whatever the world market charges, with freight and currency on top.

The effect is slow and cumulative rather than dramatic. A poor cereal harvest feeds into animal feed, which feeds into meat and dairy, which arrives on a receipt several months later.

The part that is a policy question

Water restrictions and calls to reduce unnecessary use are sensible in a drought and irrelevant to the underlying problem. Agriculture needs water at specific moments in a growing season, and a hosepipe ban does not move water to a field in June.

The real question is storage and irrigation infrastructure built for a climate that no longer shows up reliably. That is a capital spending decision, and capital spending decisions are made in years, not growing seasons.

Why irrigation is not the simple answer

The obvious response to drought is to water the crops, and in England that runs into a licensing system rather than a technical limit. Abstraction from rivers and groundwater is permitted under licence, and in dry conditions those licences are exactly what gets restricted, because the same water is needed for public supply and for the rivers themselves.