I've spent this summer complaining about the heat in the kitchen the same as every other chef in the country. What I hadn't properly clocked, until I started reading into it, is that the same heat wrecking my service is quietly wrecking something much bigger — the fields the whole industry depends on.
This isn't a "the planet is warming, we should all recycle more" post. It's more specific and more urgent than that. What's happened to British farming this summer is going to show up on your menu — in price, in availability, in the choices you make about what to put in front of people — for months, maybe longer. I think every chef should understand it, so here's what I've learned.
The driest run in living memory
England has had three droughts in five years. That's not a freak event any more, that's a pattern. This summer alone brought an unprecedented run of heatwaves through May, June and July, on the back of the driest July recorded in England and Wales. As of the second week of August, around three-quarters of England was officially in drought. Reservoirs are sitting at around 69% and falling, roughly 11.6% below where they should be for the time of year. More than 27 million people are currently living under water restrictions.
Farmers brought in their earliest harvest in twenty years — not because everything ripened early and well, but because the crops simply couldn't hold on any longer.
What it's actually doing to the food
The number that stopped me was the wheat yield. Early estimates put it at 6.8 tonnes per hectare, well below what it should be. If that figure holds, 2026 becomes the worst wheat harvest on record in this country — worse than anything in the last forty-five years of data. Wheat isn't a niche crop. It's bread, it's pasta, it's the base of half the pantry.
It's not just arable. Grass growth for livestock has collapsed under the heat, which means dairy farmers are already burning through winter feed reserves months early and having to buy in expensive replacement feed. Heat-stressed cows are producing millions fewer pints of milk. That pressure works its way straight through to beef and dairy prices, because farmers who can't turn a profit either scale back or stop.
One think tank estimates the drought could cost UK arable farmers £390 million in lost revenue this year alone. That's not an abstract number on a spreadsheet somewhere — that's farms deciding whether they can afford to plant the same acreage next season.
Why this hits kitchens harder than people realise
Here's the bit that actually changed how I think about it. Only around 16% of the fruit eaten in this country is grown here. Just over half our vegetables are domestic. We like to think of British food as, well, British — but the truth is we're far more exposed to what happens on our own soil than most people assume, and far more dependent on imports to fill the gap when that soil lets us down.
And the timing is brutal. The food industry is already absorbing cost pressure from the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East. This harvest doesn't land in a stable system that can shrug it off — it lands on top of a system already stretched thin. Manufacturers and suppliers have said plainly that they expect this to show up in prices, just not immediately. It'll be a slow bleed into next year rather than a headline overnight.
For chefs, that means the ingredients you're pricing your menu around this autumn might not cost the same by spring. Wheat-based staples, certain vegetables, dairy — the things that sit quietly in every dish without anyone thinking twice about them — are the ones most exposed.
What I think this actually asks of us
I'm not a farmer, and I'm not going to pretend I've got a policy fix for a national water crisis. But I've spent enough years buying produce to know that the chefs who do best through a squeeze like this aren't the ones who panic and rewrite the whole menu. They're the ones who already had a relationship with their supplier before the crisis started — who know which farms are struggling, which crops are holding up, and who can adjust three dishes instead of scrambling to rebuild thirty.
It's also made me think harder about seasonality, properly, not as a marketing word but as an actual buffer. A menu that flexes with what the land can give this month is a menu that survives a bad harvest. A menu locked to the same six ingredients all year round is the one that gets hit hardest when one of those six has a bad season.
None of this is new advice. But it's advice that's about to matter a lot more than it did eighteen months ago. Farming isn't a background process that happens somewhere else so food can appear in your delivery. It's the first link in everything we do, and right now that link is under more pressure than it's been in years.
Worth watching this autumn
Wheat prices, dairy prices, and anything that depends on grass — that's where I'd keep an eye. If reservoirs don't recover before autumn planting, next year's harvest could be shaped by this one before a single seed goes in the ground.
I don't have a neat conclusion for this one. It's not a book with a clear takeaway. It's a slow-moving problem that's going to ask more of everyone who sources food for a living, chefs included. Worth knowing before it lands on your order sheet.
Stefano Camplone is a chef and the founder of Edit Studio London, making sustainable workwear for professional kitchens. Sourcing and sustainability sit at the centre of how ESL is built — same reason this one felt worth writing. He writes From the Pass, a weekly newsletter for chefs — kitchen news, industry stories and one thing worth your time, every Thursday at 7am. Join here.
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