Almost three-quarters of England is now officially in drought, and Defra has responded with temporary flexibility on ELM agreements, a £50 million top-up to Sustainable Farming Incentive funding, and a new round of the Water Management Grant opening this autumn. It’s the right instinct, and farmers under pressure right now need it. But treating this as an emergency response rather than a symptom of a recurring, predictable problem means the same conversation happens again next summer — and the summer after that.
The pattern is the tell. Support keeps arriving as reactive money released once the land has already dried out, rather than upfront investment in the infrastructure that would reduce how exposed a farm is in the first place — storage, irrigation efficiency, soil water retention. A one-off grant helps this year’s cash flow. It does nothing to change next year’s risk profile, and a farm that spends relief money simply staying afloat is no better placed for the next dry spell than it was for this one.
That distinction matters more for how a farm is structured than people usually credit. A limited company with retained profit from previous years has some room to fund water infrastructure itself and treat this year’s grant as a top-up to a longer plan. A sole trader or partnership, drawing income straight out of the business, is far more likely to be relying on the grant as the whole plan — because there’s no buffer sitting behind it. The same policy lands very differently depending on which structure is catching it.
None of this is an argument against the grants themselves — cash now is genuinely useful when land is failing and input costs are climbing at the same time. The argument is against treating them as a strategy, and the frustrating part is that genuine resilience funding does already exist. The Water Management Grant covers up to 40% of the cost of building on-farm reservoirs and shifting away from summer abstraction, and this year’s Capital Grants offer has £225 million behind exactly this kind of long-term infrastructure. But neither is automatic — both require the farm to find the remaining cost itself, get quotes and permissions in place, and apply into a competitive pot, which is a far higher bar than accepting a relief top-up. A grant that arrives after the drought has already hit is relief, not resilience — the resilience funding is out there, but only for farms that go looking for it before the next dry summer, not during this one.
Is the money coming into your business this year building something that lasts, or just getting you through to the next crisis?