After the driest July on record in England and Wales, the government has announced a £65 million drought package for farmers in England, tying short-term relief to a wider push on water and rural infrastructure. The move follows a COBR meeting on extreme heat, wildfires and drought, with ministers now treating the summer as both an immediate farm business problem and a longer-term climate risk. That matters because, for many growers and livestock producers, the issue is not only lower yields but weaker cashflow, higher feed costs and difficult decisions on how to keep crops watered when river flows are under pressure.

In remarks released ahead of a visit to a South West farm on Saturday 15 August, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said farmers had brought in the earliest harvest of their working lives and seen yields come in well below expectations. He described this as the third drought in five years and argued that home-grown food production should be treated as a matter of national security. For farm businesses, that is more than political language. A drought does not stay in the field. It moves quickly into thinner margins, extra spending on feed, pressure on contractors and slower confidence around future investment.

The headline number is £65 million, but the structure of the package is worth noting. According to the government announcement, the money will come through reprioritisation within Defra's farming budget rather than a wholly separate emergency funding round. Of that total, an extra £50 million goes to the Sustainable Farming Incentive for 2026, taking that budget to £290 million. Ministers are also widening flexibilities across the Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship and legacy stewardship agreements so farmers hit by drought can keep payments when agreed actions become temporarily unworkable. In practice, that means some businesses will be able to graze or cut land that would normally be restricted, provided soils are protected.

The other strand is capital resilience. Up to £15 million has been earmarked for on-farm reservoirs, while the government says it will reduce planning barriers for larger water storage projects. An updated National Planning Policy Framework is due on Monday 17 August, and ministers say it will include further detail on reservoir delivery. This matters because better storage can reduce exposure to repeated summer shocks, smooth irrigation decisions and make whole holdings less dependent on last-minute regulatory changes when drought conditions tighten. The government also says it is working with the National Farmers' Union on an evidence-led review of permitted development rights for on-farm reservoirs.

Water access remains the hardest part of the summer for many arable producers. Farm abstraction is licensed and linked to hands-off flow rules, which stop abstraction when rivers fall too low. Those protections are staying in place, but the package promises quicker licence variations, simpler administration and easier water sharing between holdings so limited supplies can move where they are most needed. The pressure on the system is already visible. The Environment Agency says it recorded more than 1,500 licence restrictions in the week to 12 August, including Section 57 spray irrigation restrictions on 302 licences in East Anglia. That gives some sense of the scale: this is not a patchy local event but a broad operational squeeze across the sector.

The support applies to England only, as farming policy is devolved, but the drought footprint is already wide. Government figures say around three-quarters of England is now in drought, covering East Anglia, Kent, the Thames Valley, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, the East and West Midlands, Hertfordshire and London, and Wessex. Ministers insist the UK food system remains resilient and that national food security is not expected to be affected. That may be true at aggregate level, yet it sits alongside clear strain at farm level. A country can avoid a supply emergency while still seeing weaker farm incomes, uneven output and harder choices on whether to spend on equipment, storage and land improvement.

Environment Secretary Angela Eagle said the government was responding to some of the toughest conditions farm businesses have faced in decades. Alongside the farm package, ministers point to earlier plans for nine new reservoirs and almost £100 million of investment to strengthen the response to wildfires and extreme weather. The bigger test is whether this becomes a one-summer intervention or the start of a more durable adaptation plan for English farming. On the evidence released so far, the package does two useful jobs: it eases immediate pressure on working farms and starts moving public money towards water storage and infrastructure. What it does not do is remove the basic commercial risk of farming through repeated dry summers. That remains the problem sitting beneath the announcement.