Warning as wet July causes issues for farmers with potential knock-on for consumers

Farmers are warning that the recent unpredictable weather could have a knock-on impact for food prices in shops.

The hot weather in June followed by last month's heavy rain has played havoc with harvests and is hurting their businesses.

Unpredictable weather is a part of farming life but one of the wettest July's on record following a baking hot June is threatening to turn this year's harvest into a washout.

Farmer Iain Barbour explained the wider implications it could have.

He said: "This spring barley in an ideal world, should be up to a sort of a waist. And as you can clearly see, it's only knee high.

"We should be up to our waist and the crop should be almost ready to harvest right now. What happens on the farm will affect everyone with farmers the first link in the chain so there's going to be knock on effects with animal feed that's going to knock on with food prices as well. We've just had almost a perfect storm of bad weather."

Iain said some of the crops in his harvest are weeks apart from being ready.

He said: "If you look here, we've got a clear yellow-ness there, whereas the ones beside are green.

"So the yellow ones are ripe, ready to harvest, whereas the green ones are probably two weeks away. So do you go with the ones that are ready to harvest now or do you wait for two weeks but you're going to lose 50% of your crop.

"It has, it's been saturated trying to travel, you know, heavy machines across soil like that. It just creates a lot of contamination through the crops. Damage to the field then we've to rectify. So again, it's another cost."

Yesterday, the government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced £14 million of funding to unlock innovation in UK farming.

But farmers here say that when it comes to the weather, they are simply at its mercy. The National Farmers Union says that the heat in June and rain in July is causing problems nationwide.

Mhairi Dawson, from the National Farmers Union Scotland, said: “It's been a tale of two halves. The first part of the summer was incredibly dry. There was a lot of water shortages in some areas that stressed a lot of crops.

"So yields were low. Grazing was less available for livestock in some areas. People were getting quite stressed about that and then it turned out, turned its head and that's been really, really wet after that."

Want a quick and expert briefing on the biggest news stories? Listen to our latest podcasts to find out What You Need To Know...