Farmers Don’t Like Bad Weather–New Study

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

Over 80% of farmers are concerned about the impact of climate change on their ability to make a living, as more than four fifths say extreme weather has hit their productivity.

New research [1] into farmer’s attitudes to climate change and extreme weather reveals the extent to which farmers have been affected by recent extreme weather events, many made worse by climate change. In the past five years, 86% of farmers have been hit by extreme rainfall, 78% by drought and over a half by the impacts of heatwaves. Only 2% have not experienced extreme weather in some form. The research follows several recent attribution studies that draw a clear causal link between the increasingly extreme weather affecting farmers and climate change [2].
The market research of 300 farmers [3] across the UK was commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) from Grounded Research [4], specialists in gathering insights into questions about food and farming. When asked what impact recent extreme weather has had on their farms, 87% cited reduced productivity, 84% have witnessed a reduction in crop yields or livestock output.

https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2025/farmer-confidence-battered-by-climate-change-new-research

The ECIU, which is no more than a climate lobbyist outfit, has not published the survey results, presumably because they don’t want people to see the actual questions.

But asking farmers if they have had poor harvests because of bad weather in recent years would have produced the same results at any stage in the last fifty years. Bad weather is not caused by climate change and there is no evidence weather in the last five years has been any worse than in the past.

I doubt too that farmers were not even asked about “climate change”, not that any of them would be qualified to answer them.

But what about the actual farm data?

We know that wheat harvests were hit last year by the wet autumn in the previous year. (We also know that autumn was a long way from being the wettest on record).

But bad years come along every so often and over the last two decades cereal yields are up and down, but have changed little over all.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/cereal-and-oilseed-rape-production/cereal-and-oilseed-production-in-the-united-kingdom-2024

Going back further in time, cereal yields have been rising over time.

1961 to 2023

https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare

A lot has been made of the fact that cereal output is lower now than in the 1980s. This however is because of a sharp drop in the area harvested during the 1990s.

This was due to a number of factors, including:

EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Reforms, which shifted support from production-based subsidies to direct payments and introduced set-aside schemes.

A switch to alternative crops like oilseed rape.

As the record shows, there have always been bad harvests because of bad weather – too much rain, not enough rain, too cold, too hot, poor summers, poor autumns, poor springs. Indeed it is very rare that farmers get a perfect year of weather.