Following the hottest and driest summer on record in the UK, many in the agricultural sector have express concern about how climate change is going to impact on their ability to harvest crops to the same quantity and quality that people expect. Scientists at Norwich Research Park have been studying this topic for many years and have some potentially effective solutions to developing climate resistant farming.
Drought and climate change are already causing major losses to UK farming according to Prof Neil Ward, from the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) School of Environmental Sciences. He said, “The recent string of heatwaves has put increasing pressure on UK agriculture through reduced crop yields, poorer grass growth and water shortages so the sector must build greater resilience through measures such as improving soil health, increasing water storage and adapting food production systems.
“The drought is reducing yields and has resulted in an earlier harvest. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimated that it has cost the arable sector alone £300-£400m. Grass growth has also been impacted, meaning livestock farmers have to buy more animal feed.
“Wheat, spring barley and oats have also been heavily affected. Wheat is the biggest concern because it is so extensively grown. Potato crops are vulnerable to drought and irrigated crops may face restrictions on water abstraction.”
As farmers consider how to respond to increasingly dry conditions, Prof Ward has highlighted several measures that could help farms become more resilient to drought.
He said: “Improving soil organic matter can improve soil water retention, this involves building up the amount of decomposed plant and animal material, which turns soil into a better ‘sponge’ that can capture and hold more water during wet periods and release it more slowly during droughts.”
“Farmers are calling for more flexibility in being able to build on-farm reservoirs. This could result in groups of farmers establishing or strengthening water sharing arrangements.”
Looking to the future, Prof Ward believes wider changes will be needed to help agriculture adapt to climate change. He thinks that agriculture and the food system is not well enough prepared for the climate change we will face over the coming decades and that we need to build better resilience into farming systems.
Recently published UEA research shows that UK food needs a radical transformation, at a scale and pace not seen since the Second World War, if it is to respond effectively to challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss and food security.
Prof Ward summarised, “To adapt and mitigate against climate change we will require significant change across our food system, including how and what we produce, how we best use land and what we eat.”
Researchers at the John Innes Centre have also been looking at the impacts of this year’s challenging harvest. Heatwaves, flooding and drought are now regular occurrences in the UK and around the world and 2026 is no anomaly. In fact, four of the five worst harvests have
occurred in the last decade. And, at its own experimental farm in Bawburgh, the harvest was the earliest on record for the second-year running.
Low yields across many major crops highlight the urgent need to build resilience in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.
Plant and microbial science have a vital role to play in helping farmers continue to grow the food on which the UK’s national security relies. This is not only about developing better crops, but also about supporting agricultural systems that are more diverse, resilient and less reliant on expensive chemical inputs.
Prof Cristobal Uauy, Director of the John Innes Centre, explains, “We understand more than ever how plants and microbes interact, how plants grow and develop and how crops can be improved for the benefit of farmers, the environment and society. But we must accelerate the pace at which this knowledge reaches the field.
“At the John Innes Centre we believe that many of the solutions to the major challenges facing society lie within the extraordinary biology of plants and microbes. It’s clear, there is no silver bullet. Agriculture and biology are complex, as is climate change. Plant science, breeding and crop development are only part of the solution. Without good soil management, cover crops, improved water retention and effective agronomy, we cannot build system-wide resilience. That is why open, collaborative partnerships are so important.”
Breeding crops for extreme weather is challenging because the stresses they have to endure are so varied: heat, drought, waterlogging and everything in between. It can be very difficult to create a single crop variety that can withstand every stress. Crucially, farmers must choose and sow crops long before they know what conditions that season will bring.
Resilience is therefore fundamentally a problem of uncertainty. Crops and farming systems need to be able to perform across a wider range of possible environments, rather than being optimised for a single stress.
Research at the John Innes Centre supports the development of crops that can thrive under such conditions. That includes improving familiar staple crops such as wheat, as well as developing a diverse range of new crops that can thrive in climatic extremes and contribute to nutritious diets. The aim has to be to give farmers more flexibility when wet conditions delay sowing, drought shortens the growing season or other pressures disrupt the growing cycle.
That matters because the agriculture needed for the future will demand a broader range of traits. To perform under more variable conditions, crop plants will need to make better use of water and nutrients and interact productively with soils and microbes. Many of the genetic variants that could help us achieve this were simply not priorities when modern crop varieties were developed.
Prof Uauy, said, “By studying a historic set of locally adapted wheat varieties grown before the Green Revolution, called the Watkins Collection, which we host here at the John Innes Centre, we found that modern breeding left behind around 60% of the genetic diversity. We are now beginning to recover that diversity and are exploring which traits could be usefully deployed on farms today.
“This work is made possible by national, publicly-funded programmes, supported by UKRI, the BBSRC and Defra, and through the development of tools such as precision breeding, DNA
sequencing and data analysis. Together, these advances and our partnerships mean it can now take three to five years to move knowledge from the lab towards the farm, compared with around 15-20 years previously.
“That shorter horizon matters. It allows scientists to work more closely with farmers, understand the challenges they face now and test ideas through on-farm trials.
So, the challenge for the researchers is how we make use of and reintroduce the diversity that modern breeding left behind. One approach is to re-engineer the desirable modern traits into locally adapted varieties from the Watkins Collection.
Rather than cross-breeding a pre-1920s variety with a modern trait and then spending years trying to recover the best of both, the researchers hope to start with the locally adapted variety and make specific changes to it such as reducing plant height and improving grain quality.
These small edits can have a powerful effect. They bring 8,000 years of local farmer selection into a modern context, combining adaptation to diverse conditions with traits that support modern agriculture.
Prof. Uauy, concludes, “If we want harvests to remain reliable in an increasingly unreliable climate, we need to act with urgency and ambition. Future harvests depend on the choices we make now. The challenging harvest of 2026 is a reminder that food security starts long before food reaches our plates. It starts in the field, in the soil, in the seed and in the science that is already helping us build a more resilient future for people and the planet.”
One company based at Norwich Research Park is using precision breeding to develop crops with greater productive potential. ALORA is developing gene-edited crop traits that increase yield, with the aim of helping agriculture maintain productivity as growing conditions become more challenging and unpredictable.
Working closely with the John Innes Centre, ALORA is testing its lead rice yield trait in field trials in the UK, following promising results under controlled glasshouse conditions and from previous UK field trials. Their work focuses on increasing the underlying yield potential of the crop and establishing whether those gains can be maintained across different growing environments.
Higher yield can itself contribute to resilience by creating greater headroom against the losses caused by environmental stress. It can also give breeders more flexibility to combine improved productivity with locally adapted varieties or additional traits for challenges such as heat, drought or disease. ALORA’s UK and international field trials are therefore testing how increased yield potential can provide a stronger foundation for crops that need to perform across increasingly variable environments.
