In a sector that has spent years discussing climate change in the future tense, this summer has rather firmly, moved the conversation into the present.
As a keen observer of agricultural innovation, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard the phrase ‘future-proofing’ offered up at conferences, as though the future were something politely queuing outside. This year it stopped waiting. And for anyone growing fresh produce in Britain, the shift from scenario to reality has been abrupt.
A Summer That Settled the Argument
The numbers are remarkable, and not in a way any of us wanted. By mid-July the UK had already recorded more days above 30°C than the whole of 1976, and had become the first year on record to reach 35°C in May, June and July. England and Wales had taken barely a third of their average summer rainfall, and eastern and north-eastern England closer to a quarter. The Met Office has since confirmed that summer 2026 is on course to be the hottest the UK has ever recorded.
The official response followed swiftly. By late July the Environment Agency had declared drought across seven areas covering roughly half of England, and by 15 August every single county in England met the criteria for drought or prolonged dry weather. Beneath those headlines sit the numbers growers actually feel in the business: reservoir storage across England down to 75.3%, some 7.4 percentage points below the long-term average, and more than 1,500 restrictions placed on abstraction licences as river flows fell away.
As NFU Deputy President Paul Tompkins put it so plainly:
“Water is a vital ingredient in food production, and without a secure supply, we cannot build resilient farm businesses or strengthen the country’s food security.”
Nor can we treat this as one unfortunate year to be filed away and forgotten. 2025 was the UK’s warmest on record — the sixth time that record has fallen this century — and brought England’s driest spring in more than a hundred years, with river flows from March to August the second lowest since 1961. As one Met Office scientist observed, what we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal.
And the wet half of the forecast is no kinder than the dry half. The Climate Change Committee has found that 59% of the UK’s very best Grade 1 agricultural land already sits in areas at risk of flooding from rivers and the sea, while rating our delivery on adapting agricultural production as limited. Too little water in July, too much in February, and the very same field expected to deliver a Class 1 pack-out either way.
Where Agritech Must Prove Its Worth
This, surely, is the moment our sector has been preparing for.
The technology world is often tempted to talk about transformation in wonderfully sweeping terms. Growers, quite reasonably, need something more practical: tools that save water, reduce energy and inputs, protect yields and pay for themselves within a horizon a lender will actually recognise. Climate innovation will succeed on farms only when it answers the environmental question and the commercial one in the same breath.
The genuinely encouraging news is how much of it already does.
At field level, soil-moisture probes, satellite data, artificial intelligence and increasingly accurate weather intelligence can turn irrigation from a calendar habit into a proper decision and in a year like this one, that distinction is worth real money. Camera-guided machinery and robotics can target weeds, pests and disease plant by plant rather than treating an entire crop, stripping out unnecessary chemical use, fuel and field passes all at once.
Crop science has finally been let off the leash too. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025 came into force in England last November, and the first commercial farm trials of precision-bred crops have run this year. Varieties bred to cope with heat, drought and shifting pest pressures are no longer a conference slide – they’re in the ground!
A Reality Check Under Glass
Protected and controlled-environment horticulture has an important role here as well. Sensors can manage temperature, humidity, lighting and nutrients with an accuracy field crops can only dream of, creating consistent growing conditions while using water and fertiliser far more efficiently.
But I do think we should resist presenting every glasshouse and vertical farm as automatically sustainable. The source of its energy, its capital cost and the crop being grown matter enormously. Building a modern glasshouse runs to somewhere between £2.5 million and £5 million a hectare, and we still grow only around a fifth of the tomatoes and cucumbers we eat. When Simon Conway, chair of the British Tomato Growers Association, reports owners telling him the UK is “un-investable for large-scale glasshouse unless you run as an island and build gas turbines and don’t connect to the grid”, that isn’t pessimism. It’s arithmetic.
Clever engineering does not repeal the laws of economics.
The Prize Beyond the Field Gate
Agritech can also tackle emissions and losses well beyond the field, and here the prize is embarrassingly large. WRAP’s analysis of UK primary production put surplus and waste at 3.6 million tonnes a year, worth around £1.2 billion, or roughly 7% of the annual harvest. Of that, 1.6 million tonnes is outright waste — and horticultural crops account for 54% of it by weight. Those figures rest on 2017 data and are long overdue an update, though I very much doubt a refresh would flatter us.
Better forecasting can align production more closely with demand. Intelligent cold-chain monitoring can catch a temperature failure before a pallet is condemned. Smarter packaging and shelf-life technologies can keep fresh produce in saleable condition for longer. Preventing even part of that loss would avoid squandering the water, energy, labour and land already invested in growing it — and in a drought year, that first word ought to stop every one of us in our tracks.
Evidence Growers Can Trust
So the Government’s £20 million Farming Futures competition for automation and robotics, open until the end of September, is genuinely welcome — as is the wider £123 million committed to agricultural innovation in 2026/27 and the £345 million in equipment, technology and research grants promised over the coming decade.
Yet funding prototypes is only half the job, and it’s the easier half. Britain has never been short of excellent agricultural science. What we are persistently bad at is getting proven technologies onto commercial farms — particularly the smaller horticultural businesses where, as growers themselves say, two to four per cent on the margin decides whether you’re still trading next season.
Happily, the reasons are no mystery. Research by the UK Agri-Tech Centre, built on 122 in-depth interviews with farmers, found 73% describing technology adoption as the single biggest change to their practice in five years. This is hardly a sector refusing to move! But 42% took a deliberately measured approach, wanting to see clear, demonstrated benefit before committing, and the same barriers surfaced time and again: cost, data security, training and rural connectivity.
Growers want field-tested solutions to problems they actually have — not products designed at a distance and validated by the company selling them.
Which is precisely why the least headline-grabbing corner of the funding landscape deserves rather more attention than it gets. Defra’s ADOPT scheme pays for farmer-led, on-farm trials and requires the findings to be shared. Independent evidence, generated on real holdings, in soils and conditions a grower recognises — and its ninth round closes on 23 September. A trusted neighbour’s honest verdict will move a technology from interesting to installed faster than any launch event ever managed, and we should fund and publicise that accordingly, including the trials that don’t work out. Especially those.
Final Thoughts
The rest of the answer is decidedly unglamorous: accessible finance, independent evidence, skills, reliable rural connectivity, and innovators talking to growers before the design is frozen rather than after. It also requires investment in the essentials nobody cuts a ribbon for. No robot can compensate for a reservoir that was never built, an inadequate electricity connection, or a supply contract that leaves no room to invest. August’s drought package — up to £15 million for on-farm water storage, planning reform for reservoirs and streamlined abstraction licensing from September — is a welcome start, and a belated acknowledgement that water storage is now core production infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
Agritech cannot solve climate change alone, and nobody serious pretends otherwise. What it can do is help British growers produce more intelligently, withstand far greater volatility and cut waste and emissions at every stage between the seed and the shelf. That is not a futuristic ambition. For UK fresh produce it is fast becoming the price of resilience — and, as ever, the proof will be in the planting!
