Walking through their orchard at Lathcoats Farm, the apples on many of the trees are visibly burned, their skin partially browned, the flesh beneath corked. A significant portion of the farm’s harvest that year was unsaleable.
A record-breaking heatwave in July literally baked apples on the boughs, but Philip Taylor, who runs the farm with his nephew, now has bigger concerns. The ground beneath the trees is cracking with dryness – it has rained so little this spring and summer. Even last winter, when rainwater normally collects in the ground to keep it moist for months, it just wasn’t wet enough.
England last month had its driest July since 1935, and the southern part of the country, including Lathcoats Farm, received just 17% of its average rainfall for the month, according to the UK Met Bureau. There is also not a significant amount of rain on the horizon.
Water levels in reservoirs are falling rapidly and rivers are drying up. Even the River Thames that runs through London has shrunk, its first 5 miles dried up and gone. Thirteen rivers monitored by the Environment Agency are at their lowest levels ever recorded.
The climate crisis caused by the burning of fossil fuels is causing hot weather, droughts and floods to become more frequent and intense in the UK, and the hotter the planet gets, the worse these impacts will be.
But for farmers of thirsty crops like apples, there is no substitute for rain straight from the sky.
“Growing apples isn’t going to work if we have summers like this every year,” Taylor told CNN at his farm, a 40-mile drive northeast of London. “Our access to water at the moment is exclusively from the tap. Giving apple trees enough water to produce a decent crop would be far too expensive.”
Luckily, Taylor has other sources of income. His family has turned the farm into an attractive place to visit, with a cafe and farm shop selling Lathcoats apple juice, fresh produce, organic breads and cakes. People also come here to pick their own fruit, which is a fun day out, especially for young children.
He and his nephew also sell berry crops like berries and plums that can be irrigated with irrigation. But even that water is becoming scarce, and they can’t afford to take some of the measures that larger farms take to protect themselves from extreme weather conditions.
“What we’re doing about it, we’re just kind of worried,” Taylor said. “We may just stop growing apples. We will certainly consider which varieties we could plant in the future. Some would be more resilient in these temperatures than some of the traditional English varieties we are growing now.”
3 billion liters of water are lost through leaks every day
Garden hose bans are forcing people to find less wasteful ways to fill up their gardens and wash their cars. Filling up a paddling pool, as some English people do on a hot day, is also illegal in many areas.
But not only consumption is a problem or even the lack of rain – the infrastructure of the United Kingdom is several hundred years old and particularly leaky. In England and Wales, 3.1 billion liters of water – enough to fill 1,240 Olympic-size swimming pools – are lost to leaks every day.
“There’s a real lack of respect for the water that we have, which is a really, really precious resource,” Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist and hydrologist at the University of Reading, told CNN. “We drink it, we use it to grow our food, and yet we leak it everywhere. That’s one of the biggest problems. The water companies just let it drain – they really dropped the ball there.”
Water UK, which represents 12 major water companies across the country, said much has already been done to plug the leaks.
“Companies have increasingly placed innovation and technology at the heart of this effort,” the organization said in a statement to CNN. “Smart networks, smart sensors, satellite technology and drones are all part of the arsenal deployed to detect and fix leaks faster than ever.”
The companies represented by Water UK also plan to invest £14 billion ($17 billion) in reservoirs and systems to transport water across the country, “enough to feed 10 million people” so that it can be used for particularly dry conditions Times like this can be saved.
Another problem is that only around half of homes in England and Wales have water meters, allowing businesses to charge customers based on their actual consumption. The rest only pay what the companies estimate for a house their size.
The larger United Kingdom has the highest per capita water consumption of all Europe, using more than 140 liters per day. The measurement has demonstrably reduced water consumption by more than 20%. Without them, there is little incentive to limit consumption.
Cloke said water companies may not want to expand meters, which could eat away at their profits, assuming people were more careful about their consumption.
“Water companies are going to want to make money selling water, so it’s in their interest to keep selling even if there are restrictions,” Cloke said. “We haven’t gotten this quite right, but water companies don’t have the incentive to do the right thing environmentally, and that goes for pollution and floods and droughts and leaks. It was very much a case of ‘let’s just get on with it, business as usual’.”
Britain’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology warned on Wednesday that drought conditions now affecting much of the country could last until at least October. The center is only a few months ahead and there are concerns the country could also face a second straight dry winter, which could even spill over into next year.
That could be disastrous, not only for households but also for food security, which has already been undermined by Russia’s war in Ukraine and droughts elsewhere in Europe. It would also push food prices even higher and fuel inflation, which is already painful for millions of people across the country as mortgage rates and rents rise and energy prices soar.
As Taylor told CNN from his farm, it was one thing at a time.
“Everything happened at once,” he said. “They could start with Brexit and go to Ukraine and then to Covid. And now climate change is really starting to hurt.”
The garden of England withers
Across London, in the south, the English county of Kent is known as the Garden of England for its rolling green countryside, fertile land and orchards that provide the nation with strawberries, apples and pears. It’s also a place that attracts green-fingered people who move here and maintain large gardens in their homes.
David and Margaret Miller have lived at their home in the town of Edenbridge, Kent for around 40 years. The couple shared photos to CNN of what their garden once looked like — a lush green oasis of geraniums, azaleas, dahlias, cannas and echinacea plants. They also brought out several certificates to show their awards from the local Edenbridge in Bloom horticultural competition, which they have won on multiple occasions.
Now her front yard is parched and brown from the lack of rain. Some of their dahlias haven’t bloomed at all in the heat, and the pink echinacea flowers have completely wilted, their petals drooping.
The couple have chosen to only water the flowers and plants that are most important to them. Although they are not yet subject to a hose ban, they have switched to watering cans “to do the right thing,” Margaret Miller said. It took what used to be a 30-minute job twice as long. In this heat they sometimes have to water their few plants twice a day just to keep them alive.
Not an easy task for 84-year-old David, who suffers from dizziness, or 80-year-old Margaret, who has problems with her hip. And her garden is everything to her. A hobby and a haven that got her through the worst of the pandemic.
“Seeing them all wither in the heat makes you sad,” Margaret Miller said of her plants. “Because you nursed her over a period of time.”
She agrees that people should conserve water as a precious resource, but she is frustrated that her garden is suffering while the country loses so much to leaks every day.
“I’m pretty upset about that, because then they come up with a justification like, ‘Oh, we have a sewage system that’s hundreds of years old, and that’s not the water company’s fault.’ But I would have thought that nowadays they have devices that they can use to pinpoint where those leaks are and fix them,” she said. “I’m sure they make a lot of money, so why don’t they put it back in? It makes me angry.”