Four years of consecutive dry summers have broken business models across the south and east. Input costs are up, produce prices are down, and farmers that should be fine are barely staying afloat. By any measure, the financial pressure on the sector is the worst since the late 1980s.
And then this week happened.
Bluetongue
517 confirmed cases of bluetongue. 2,402 more premises under investigation. Nearly all of them are here in Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset.
The livestock are dying. Farmers are reporting the cases themselves because the surveillance system is overwhelmed. Most detected cases came through farmers spotting something wrong, not through any proactive government system. One week saw 22 new confirmations in a single day.
These aren’t statistics. These are farmers who’ve already spent four years battling drought, depleting winter forage stocks in August, watching margins disappear. Now they’re losing animals to a disease that came from Europe on the wind.
BSE
Classical BSE confirmed in Dumfries and Galloway. One case, caught early by Scotland’s surveillance system. The animal didn’t enter the food chain, and there is no immediate threat.
But context matters. Farmers in that region are already dealing with bluetongue cases, movement restrictions, veterinary investigations. Now they’re navigating additional biosecurity measures and movement controls. The system responded quickly. That doesn’t make it feel less overwhelming when you’re already at capacity.
The Government’s Response
This week, a £65m drought package. £50m for farming schemes, £15m for on-farm reservoirs, greater flexibility on environmental agreements, faster abstraction licence changes.
The reservoir funding is significant because it shows the government finally understands something that should have been obvious years ago: wet winters and dry summers is now the pattern. You need to capture water when it’s plentiful and store it for when it runs dry.
Here’s Where It Breaks Down
I’ve been advising farming clients since last year to prepare for reservoir projects. The logic is straightforward – the climate pattern is clear. Many of therm are ready to invest.
But there’s a problem between “ready to invest” and “actually building a reservoir.”
It costs £45,000 just to get a project ready for construction. Before planning approval, before the digging, just to maybe get permission. Then you navigate environmental impact assessments, abstraction licensing, multiple regulatory bodies, and timeline uncertainty measured in years.
The £15m government fund divided across 94,000 English farm businesses, that’s roughly £160 per farm.
My clients understand they need reservoirs, and the government is finally funding them. But the system that’s supposed to enable them – planning, licensing, regulatory approval – remains unchanged and broken. The money assumes the barriers are already removed, but they aren’t.
Why This Matters This Week
Farmers facing bluetongue outbreaks and disease uncertainty need resilience, and water storage is part of that. But they also need to be able to actually build the infrastructure without spending five years in planning hell!
The government’s announced funding for the right answer. But it’s announced funding for a solution that assumes the real problem is already solved, when it isn’t.
What farmers need is government to remove the barriers – planning delays, licensing complexity, regulatory uncertainty – not just hand them money for schemes designed around existing barriers.
Instead, they’re managing multiple crises simultaneously – disease outbreaks, regulatory complexity, planning delays, financial stress—while government funding assumes the structural problems don’t exist.
That gap is the real problem.