Why Europe’s farmers need more than drought-resistant crops to survive

World Food Day: Europe is ‘losing hundreds of farms a day’. Crop diversification and subsidies that pay for outcomes could save them, farmers say.

Almonds decimated by frost, tomatoes disrupted by heat, and Halloween pumpkins shrunk by drought: it’s been a punishing year for agriculture in Europe.

The hot, dry summer – which would have been “virtually impossible” if it weren’t for climate change – reduced the continent’s forecast grain harvest by an estimated 16.7 million tonnes, costing farmers more than €3 billion, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

“After this summer, many European farmers are on the brink,” says Josefine Herz, managing director of the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA).

“One year prices collapse because they grew too much; the next, drought punishes them for growing at all, and each swing hands a bigger share to the same few processors and retailers who are increasing prices on the consumer side.”

French vegetable growers’ association Légumes de France warned in July that losses in some sectors could reach 50 per cent.

Disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the war on Iran, have added to pressure on fuel and fertiliser supplies, while drought has restricted cargo traffic on some European waterways. Together, these supply-chain problems are adding to concerns about the cost of farming and the security of food supplies.

But could changing the way we farm pave the way for a more certain future?

Diversification of crops helps farmers weather the extremes

At Curly Creek Ranch in Spain’s Basque Country, tomatoes – one of the farm’s highest earners at €7/kg – stopped flowering in the extreme heat.

“Imagine the length of the tomato plant and the middle third has a gap without fruit. We never saw that before,” says farmer Meghan Sapp, who is also EARA’s external relations director. Flowering has since resumed, and she hopes a later-than-usual season will make up some of the shortfall.

A lack of water has also affected the farm’s Halloween pumpkins, which are smaller than usual this year, while high temperatures left corn with “early signs of burning on the leaves, which we’d never seen before”, says Meghan.

The heat also exposed weaknesses in the local water supply, including leaky infrastructure: Curly Creek Ranch repeatedly received less than its expected daily allocation, forcing authorities to deliver 50,000 litres by tanker.

But diversification has helped spread the risk.

“Many years we don’t get a single aubergine due to lack of heat and yet we plant them anyway, just in case,” Meghan explains. “This year that bet paid off… for the first time ever we had a huge crop.”

It’s a tactic that’s also working for farmers further south in Spain.

“Historically, our farm depended heavily on cereals,” says Yanniek Schoonhoven, who owns La Junquera farm in Murcia. “We have gradually diversified… looking for systems that are better suited to an increasingly unpredictable climate.”

Aromatic plants like rosemary, lavender, sage and oregano are particularly well adapted to dry Mediterranean conditions. They also fetch good prices: around €2,000 per hectare, with costs of about €1,000 which also cope well in a dry climate, bring in even more: around €2,350 per hectare with similar costs

But frost during a critical period wiped out La Junquera’s almonds, a “very significant loss” of around €700–€1,050 per hectare.

The challenges of branching out from commodity crops

Despite the attractive margins on certain drought-resilient crops, it’s not a simple switch.

While aromatics can be distilled into essential oils, a higher-value product than grain, “these markets require processing, investment and reliable buyers”, explains Yanniek.

Cereals and oilseeds, by contrast, are commodity crops: standardised products sold in bulk, with prices largely dictated by wider markets. Farmers may have established buyers for their harvests, but have little leverage to charge more for climate resilience. At La Junquera, wheat brings in around €600 per hectare against roughly €500 in costs

Subsidies tend to favour these crops, though. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) pays basic income support by hectares farmed, not by crop type or output, so more funding naturally flows to large-scale farms which often grow commodities. The EU also steps in if market prices for commodity crops fall below a certain threshold.

Yet commodities are not immune to extreme weather. On Gut Weimarschmieden, a 700-hectare organic conservation agriculture farm in Fladungen, Germany, summer barley and winter wheat struggled in the heat, says manager Maximillian Krimm, while the cornfields produced about 17 tonnes instead of the usual 25 to 30.

Spelt and canola fared better. Maximillian is also considering emmer, an old wheat variety whose yields are 20 to 30 per cent lower than conventional wheat, for only a slightly higher price. “In general we don’t grow much that’s lower value because the prices don’t justify it,” he says.

Restoring soil health can turn things around for Europe’s farmers

Commodity farming also favours intensive methods that deplete soil and generate emissions, not least from synthetic fertiliser – and crop choice alone won’t fix that.

“A drought-tolerant crop planted into dead, compacted soil in a biodiversity dead zone will still struggle, because there’s nothing left to hold the water when it comes,” says Lily Maxwell-Lwin, head of advocacy at international non-profit Commonland.

Her team works with local communities across more than 50 countries to restore degraded landscapes using a holistic approach that blends social impact, biodiversity restoration, financial return and pride in place.

“For most arable farms in our region, years of tillage, monoculture and synthetic input use has turned the soil into hard, dry land with low soil organic carbon, limiting the soil’s ability to infiltrate and retain the rain when it does come. Instead it runs off, creating erosion,” explains Meghan.

Healthier soil can raise yields, cut the need for costly synthetic fertiliser and hold more water, easing drought and flooding alike. “We’ve watched degraded landscapes turn around in a decade: soil that crusted over starts absorbing rain again, hillsides that shed water start acting like sponges,” says Lily.

At La Junquera, ponds, swales, vegetation cover and keyline design slow runoff and increase infiltration. “For us, adapting to drought isn’t about finding more water. It’s about making much better use of every drop of rain that falls,” says Yanniek.

That is what gives resilient crops “a fighting chance”, says Lily. “If we want farmers to take the risk of switching to lower-yield, climate-resilient varieties, we have to invest in restoring the land underneath them first, not just hand them a different seed and call it done.”

What support do farmers need from governments?

The EU’s CAP subsidy scheme does reward regenerative practices like crop rotation, cover cropping and planting nitrogen-fixing crops, which produce natural fertiliser and improve soil health. But farmers still largely bear the costs and responsibility of implementing these measures alone, with little recognition for the benefits they create for food security, biodiversity and human health.

“We need policies that make it less risky for farmers to adapt,” says Yanniek, pointing to better insurance against drought and frost, and financial support during the years it takes to establish perennial crops.

Meghan wants regional policymakers to move fast and fund the move to regenerative land management, through advisory services, transition insurance and co-investment in new machinery.

EARA farmers achieve equal or better harvests with less water and fewer inputs, says Josefine, yet “neither the market nor the CAP pays for the resilience built”. She calls for “a fair market and a CAP that pays for outcomes, not just practices and hectares, so resilience stops being a cost farmers absorb alone”.

One of the alliance’s farmers, Gunnar Thelin of Västra Gatugård, a five-hectare holding in Vederslöv, Sweden, sketches how that could work: satellite measurements over the season would check that photosynthesis is above an agreed level for the region, and bare ground and soil temperature below agreed levels.

Meet them and you receive CAP money; miss them and you don’t. “That’s the incentive to go regen,” he says.

Not everyone is convinced. Maximillian says he’s “not a big fan of subsidies” and believes farmers must simply adapt through regenerative farming. Better prices alone, he says, won’t solve the underlying problem.

But for many, a fair market remains the missing piece. “Growing a drought-resistant crop is only half the solution,” says Yanniek. “Farmers also need a market that pays enough to make growing it worthwhile.” Without one, Josefine warns, “Europe loses hundreds of farms a day this way, the very farms holding the solutions to regenerating it.”

Source: www.euronews.com