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How NFFN farmers are handling drought and water management

United Kingdom
Farm Practices
arable
Dairy
drought
Livestock

With heatwaves and long, dry spells becoming a regular occurrence, we asked farmers for top tips on how to cope with a changing climate.

The weather and our changing climate have dominated agricultural headlines in 2025, with farmers facing huge challenges from heatwaves and long, record-breaking dry spells.

Adopting nature-friendly farming techniques can help farmers mitigate the impact of these volatile weather patterns and continue producing food sustainably. We asked three of our farmers, representing the livestock, arable and dairy sectors, to share their top tips on how they handle drought and manage the availability of water throughout the year.

Jack Cockburn - Treberfedd, Ceredigion

For me, one of the most important things for handling the conditions we’re now seeing more regularly is shade. We’re a livestock grass farm, and I’ve noticed that in hot and dry weather, the grass that is shaded by trees or hedges for at least part of the day keeps growing and is considerably greener than that in the centre of the fields in full sun.

I would assume the rates of evapotranspiration from the soil and plants are lower in shaded areas. The soil closer to the trees could also be holding more organic matter from the accumulated leaf deposits over years, improving its capacity to hold water. 

Planting trees is a long-term investment. Farmers need to be supported when they have to put in significant initial investment but the returns are slow to come to fruition.

Jack Cockburn

Planting trees is a long-term investment. It can take 10 to 20 years for trees planted to help shade soil and livestock or crops to grow to an effective height. That’s why it is essential that we have agri-environment schemes helping farmers to transition to ways of working with nature at the heart of things. Farmers need to be supported through that initial period when they have to put in significant initial investment but the returns are slow to come to fruition.

Colin Chappell - Chappell Farms, Lincolnshire

As an arable farm, we’re looking for our soil to act as a sponge so it allows the water through when it’s flooding, but still keeps it there for the plants to access during the rest of the year. It’s becoming more and more vital because conditions as dry as we’ve had this year make growing crops extremely challenging.

We create that soil structure by disturbing the soil as little as possible, keeping as much of the soil as possible covered throughout the year and armouring the soil with accumulated straw or debris. It’s the key pillars of regenerative agriculture, adapted to our landscape. We need to protect the soil and the microbes that live within it - that’s what farming this way is all about.

If you’re a farmer wanting to start out working this way, you need to take things one step at a time. Trying to change things all at once, in one growing season, is the classic mistake people make. You need to take one thing out of your cultivation system at once. If you would normally plough, then use the power harrow, and then drill, you could try taking out the plough first, and take things from there.

Matthew Elphick -  Brays Farm, Surrey

I must admit, I underestimated how long drought conditions would last this year. That means that plans for expanding our dairy farm business from the start of this year have had to be put on the backburner.

At the start of spring, I did some muck spreading, which took quite a bit of my grazing land out of the rotation because we didn’t get the rain to wash it in. We then moved to twice-a-day milking for the first time, which I thought would be a positive step.

We’re now back at once-a-day milking, and the grazing rotation has been a struggle because the grass hasn’t been regrowing and the animals have been getting around the paddocks too quickly. To keep our 30-day rotation, we’ve had to resort to bale grazing using some of our winter silage. 

This year has been a lesson for us to take our foot off the throttle. It’s really important that we farm regeneratively and don’t over-graze, but it’s clear our soil has not yet regenerated enough to withstand these extreme weather conditions and hold water in reserve for times of drought.  We need to take a long-term view and work at a pace that regenerates our soil so we can continue growing grass in long periods without rainfall.  

Further information on building climate resilience into your business is available in our leaflet A Practical Guide to Climate Action for UK Farming.

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