Perhaps 2026 hasn’t just been a dry year. It’s been an erratic one.

That’s a provocative title, but bear with me.

Yes, the drought and heat have certainly nailed a lot of crops, especially spring-sown. I’ve seen some dreadful spring oat yields in particular.

But if drought and heat explain everything, why have we also seen some exceptional oilseed rape yields, while so many winter wheat crops have disappointed?

Different crops, different critical growth stages and different responses to the same season, obviously. But I think there is more to learn from that than simply saying “it was too dry.”

As an exceptionally early harvest draws towards a close, the yield reports I’m hearing are becoming pretty universally disappointing.

That includes some very good farms, with well-managed crops that looked perfectly respectable only a month or so ago.

Poor grain fill is probably the most common comment.

It would be easy to put that down to drought and heat. They have clearly played a huge part.

But I’m increasingly wondering whether that is too simple.

Looking back, the crop has had to deal with a very erratic sequence of conditions.

We came through a mild but very wet winter. Crops kept growing, but soils were wet for long periods. Prolonged wet soils may also have restricted root development and left some crops less well equipped to explore deeper into the profile when conditions subsequently turned dry.

Spring was not especially extreme, but I remember plenty of crops looking slightly under stress. I was certainly reluctant to push some of them too hard with PGRs.

Then yellow rust really got going, especially on the Yr15 gene varieties!

At the same time, ryegrass seemed to absolutely thrive, while blackgrass was often less aggressive than we might normally expect.

Then came May.

The Met Office temperature data shows it well. The first half of the month was cool, with both daytime and night-time temperatures often below average. Then within a matter of days we moved into exceptional heat. We even had ground frosts on early emerged maize.

The crop didn’t experience an “above average May”.

It experienced cold, then heat.

That matters.

By then, some crops had already lost tillers, some had carried disease, some had shallow root systems, and some were probably already carrying a fair amount of physiological stress.

Then the demand for water and assimilates ramped up just as soils began to dry.

By grain fill, the crop was being asked to cope with yet another change in conditions.It is also worth separating the heat we experienced during grain filling from the very hot weather later in July. By that later stage, much of the wheat crop was already approaching the end of grain fill. That heat undoubtedly accelerated senescence, reduced grain moisture and brought harvest forward, but I suspect much of the yield story had already been written by then.

That makes me think the heat may not have caused all of the problems.

Perhaps it exposed them.

·      Were the root systems deep enough?

·      Had the crop retained enough tillers?

·      Was there enough functioning green leaf?

·      Had disease already reduced capacity?

·      Was soil structure helping or hindering access to water?

·      Why did some crops continue filling grain while others seemed to stop?

I don’t think there is one answer.

And I’m increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims there is.

Maybe resilience needs to mean something broader than drought tolerance or disease resistance.

Perhaps it is simply the capacity of the whole farming system to keep functioning when the weather stops behaving as we expect.

That is why I think this harvest, disappointing as it is, is worth studying carefully.

Before we write 2026 off as a bad year and start cutting next season’s input budgets, perhaps the better question is:

Where was yield actually lost?

And then:

Why did some fields cope better than others?

I don’t have all the answers.

But I think this season is giving us an awful lot to listen to.