News

Nov 04, 2024

Rain blamed for 85% fall in Herefordshire farm's grape yield

A farm boss has said one of their harvest yields has fallen by 85% this year due to heavy rain and not enough sunshine. James Wright runs Whittern Farms in Herefordshire and grows crops of berries,

A farm boss has said one of their harvest yields has fallen by 85% this year due to heavy rain and not enough sunshine.

James Wright runs Whittern Farms in Herefordshire and grows crops of berries, grapes and cider apples.

Mr Wright said he this year had to constantly adapt harvesting methods to cope with the changing weather conditions, with heavy rain significantly affecting the grapes.

"The loss in value runs into a few thousand pounds, we're looking at about a yield of 15% of what we harvested last year, and that was a bumper of a year, but this year not so much," he said.

Last month, BBC figures showed fruit and vegetable yields had fallen by about 5% across the UK.

Mr Wright said he had explored different methods, like a harvesting machine for small fruit to gather crop and save money, but the unpredictable weather still impacted the quality of produce.

"We had a miserable spring which delayed flowering and in the run up to harvest it did not stop raining.

"If we had a few weeks of [sunshine] it would have been lovely but instead we had that horrible long spell of damp weather, torrential rain meaning we couldn't even travel on the fields.

"We've got about 30 acres altogether and we've picked over half of it with the machine but the latter half, sadly, it's not going to be of quality."

Mr Wright said he watches the forecast in a bid to plan around the weather.

"It's something you can't predict, the forecast is ever changing and these extremes are becoming more extreme which is a challenge we didn't foresee," he said.

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