Ponds and collection tanks, drought-resistant crops and a certain rodent. As the climate crisis brings more extreme weather to Britain, farmers are experimenting with new tactics to tackle drought – and flooding.

The string of heatwaves and drought conditions experienced across vast swathes of Britain this summer has brought a series of challenges for food producers, particularly those growing crops more suited to the UK’s traditional climate.

Hot and dry weather has resulted in the earliest UK cereals harvest in at least 20 years, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. The lack of rainfall has led to cauliflowers looking “suntanned” – with a yellow colouring instead of white, while cucumber plants have produced misshapen fruit and broccoli is undersized, forcing the UK to import more vegetables than usual this summer.

While many farmers have installed reservoirs to store water for periods of drought, these can be costly, require planning permission and are sometimes not sufficient to cope with long dry spells. But some farmers are turning to more novel solutions as they struggle to nurture crops and cattle in the heat.

Improving soils and digging ponds

In south Cambridgeshire, Martin Lines has already finished his harvest, a month earlier than usual, after navigating the second hot, dry and windy summer in a row.

“There’s like a hot hairdryer on everything, and it just saps the moisture out,” says Lines, an arable farmer who also leads the Nature Friendly Farming Network.

On his own farm and across the network he leads, farmers are improving the health of their soils, to allow them to hold more water, as well as creating water storage to save rain.

“We’re focused on the soil, we’re focusing on having bigger, bushier hedges and more trees in the landscape to slow the flow of air down,” he says.

Lines believes farmers should assess their annual water needs and how much rainfall they can store, through rainwater harvesting, where large tanks are connected to gutters on farm buildings.

“What we need to do is connect up to local drainage and rivers. Most rivers have digital flow sensors now, so the moment there is excess flow that is going to go out to sea, farmers should be messaged to say ‘turn your pump on’,” he says. “We could manage this flow a lot smarter than we are now.”

Reviving marshes as reservoirs

Many areas of farmland sit on former marshes and have been drained using pumps and ditches for decades, or even centuries.

In some areas, farmers are experimenting with changing the system so water is stored on their land instead of being pumped into rivers and out to sea. This can help cope with flooding in the winter and during periods of drought while increasing resources for wildlife.

West Pikefish Farm, run by the Smith family, has historically grown apples near the River Teise near Maidstone in Kent.

It is using an old orchard, grubbed up because it regularly flooded, to create ponds, scrapes and other wetland features that fill with water in the winter and feed into a larger winter lagoon. The land can still be grazed and is poised to be a traditional orchard in future.

The lagoon will store 4m litres of water for summer irrigation that has been filtered of silt by the neighbouring wetlands.

“It’s about risk management,” says farmer James Smith from Pikefish Farm, who says he was concerned about access to water during times of drought as it is becoming more difficult to take water from the Teise. The set-up also helps manage flooding. “When it is winter and the river is in spate it has a bellows effect and the river can flow into these features and reduce risk downstream.”

“We are proposing these features could be rolled out all along the catchment, at landscape scale, making it more resilient, holding water in the landscape rather than sending it down as quick as we can to the nearest village.”

His only frustration is that the project, which is in partnership with several bodies including the South East Rivers Trust, the government waste reduction body Wrap and the Environment Agency is taking longer than expected to break ground amid the need for planning consents and various surveys. He had hoped to start work this summer but it is now likely to be next year.

“We are trying to create a roadmap so hopefully it can become more streamlined,” he says.

Growing different crops

The changing climate is also requiring farmers to diversify, changing the crops they grow on their farms.

Lines says he is “now looking at what Europe is growing like sunflowers and soya beans”.

Lines and others believe legumes – a large family of plants including beans, peas, chickpeas and lentils – could also provide an answer for the changing climate, as they require hot, dry conditions, and could boost the UK’s food security.

Despite this, the variability of the British climate means such experiments are not always a success. “We tried sunflowers a couple of years ago and that was the wettest winter and spring. It’s the unpredictability that is really challenging, we don’t actually know how the next season is going to be,” Lines says.

Researchers including Prof Pete Iannetta at the James Hutton Institute, which focuses on researching land, crops, water and the environment, believe the UK needs to grow more legumes to feed both humans and livestock.

He says legumes occupy just 5% of UK cropped land. “In northern Germany they are growing tropical legumes, things like cowpeas [such as black-eyed peas] and soya beans. These were not traditionally associated with northern Europe and would come from India and Myanmar. Crops such as chickpeas are becoming more viable, we have even got some in the south of England and the quality will improve over time.”

Beavers – natural environmental engineers

There has been almost no rain since the beginning of June on Chris Jones’s beef farm in Cornwall and the intense heat means soil is drying out.

But Jones has not had to bring in feed for his cattle, which are still grazing the field thanks to some simple measures and some helpful rodents.

Jones has planted more trees to help keep water in the land and to provide shelter for cattle. He also practices rotational grazing, which involves breaking fields into smaller paddocks and moving the herd frequently so it only comes back to the same spot every three to six months.

But Jones’s best asset is a family of beavers who, although kept within a relatively small enclosure since their introduction nine years ago, have built a reservoir that contains 3m litres of water.

The beavers’ actions not only help retain water in the land but slow the flow of potential flood waters in rainy periods. Their work preserves damp areas that can be grazed during drought while their dam can be pumped out if necessary. It came in handy in 2022, when many farms ran dry in drought conditions.

This year, Jones is eyeing the dam again: “We haven’t yet had to pump out but we may well have to.”

He says his tactics are intended to work “with minimal financial and environmental cost” and beavers are “the most useful and cheapest way to build reserves of water on our land”.

“Since last year we stopped being green and occasionally hot and dry Britain and joined the Mediterranean. The race is on now to adapt.”

From crop shading to drone ‘dusting’

Katie Cross, a water specialist at Wrap, says farmers need a “combination of tools” to become more resilient, from nature-based tactics to water collection.

In Cumbria, not known for being a dry area, the changing climate has prompted an experiment in which nine cattle farmers are adding extra guttering and huge water butts to store water from farm building roofs during the winter for use during dry spells.

In Norfolk, farmers are trialling strip tillage – leaving strips of unploughed land between crops of maize or sugar beet so that more water is kept in the soil and there is less need for irrigation. Planting cover crops between seasons is a more widely adopted method of retaining moisture and preventing run-off.

Providing more shade – using trees or other methods such as “dusting” the top of polytunnels with specialist shading substances using drones – can also preserve moisture so plants need less irrigation.

In some parts of the world, including France and the US, farmers are experimenting with using solar panels above their crops as a form of shading while generating energy.