Farmers and processors after soaking wet spring: ‘Times of plenty are over’

After exceptionally wet months, farmers experience significant delays in sowing and planting grain, potatoes and vegetables. Flemish agricultural and food companies are once again taking lower yields and higher prices into account. ‘What we normally do in a month and a half is suddenly not possible in a week.’

‘The weather will be dry in the coming days, so the book is already full from Thursday until the end of next week. But the problem is that they are predicting rain again from Tuesday.’ Contractor Peter Deruyttere says it with the courage of desperation between the phone calls he receives from dozens of farmers these days. His company in Kortemark, West Flanders, sows, processes and harvests carrots, maize, beans and salsify on behalf of farmers and processing companies.

But due to the persistent rainfall in recent months, the entire process of fertilizing, plowing and preparing the fields and sowing itself has gradually suffered a worrying delay. The fields have been too swampy for months to start work. Crops that require many growing days, such as early potatoes or beets, are barely or not yet in the ground.

‘It is best to sow carrots around April 10,’ says Deruyttere. ‘It’s a month later and we’ve barely done one plot. It’s simply too wet. We need three or four weeks of dry weather and then a good growing summer. But we can’t suddenly do in a week what we normally do in a month and a half.’

Figures confirm the feeling among many arable farmers and contractors that it has hardly stopped raining since October last year. The RMI measurements show that 690.4 liters of water fell in Uccle from October to April. For those same seven months, the average was 478 liters from 1991 to 2020. November 2023 (132.2 litres) and February (126.5 litres) and April 2024 (81.1 litres) are in the top five for rainfall amounts in those months since 1991.

“There are geographical differences in Flanders, but in some places it has rained more in six months than in a normal year,” says Pieter Van Oost, horticulture and arable policy advisor at Boerenbond. ‘Last year the season also started late, but the difference is that we now start from a wetter surface due to the rain in the autumn. One week of drier weather is not enough.’

Boerenbond calculated that less than 20 percent of the corn has been sown in Flanders, while this is normally 100 percent by mid-May. Barely a fifth of beets and potatoes are also in the ground. ‘The problem is also that the planting material has already been ordered and delivered. The farmers must ensure that it does not become moldy or rot. That all costs time and money,” says Van Oost.

Vegetable growers are also scratching their heads. Ingro, the largest cooperative in our country with around 700 growers, achieved half of its record turnover of 120 million euros from cauliflower and Brussels sprouts in 2023. ‘Normally we are already planting them, but now the start-up still has to begin,’ says account manager Luc De Waele. ‘The problem is that other crops, peas, beans and spinach, then move on. If everything goes into the ground in the same period, this also causes problems with the harvest. Last year we already saw that processors could not handle those large volumes simultaneously.’

It shows how farmers and their customers are at the receiving end of the more erratic weather conditions associated with climate change. Longer periods of rain or drought make harvests less predictable. “I have 43 seasons under my belt,” says Bernard Haspeslagh, the operational director of the frozen vegetable giant Ardo. For 35 seasons, the harvest grew by approximately 2 percent annually, also due to improved cultivation techniques. But in the last eight years it has fallen by 15 percent. The disruption is structural. The times of plenty are over.’

The economic fabric of processing companies that has developed around productive Flemish arable farming, with, in addition to Ardo, also giants such as Clarebout, Agristo and Greenyard, requires adjustment. “We can spread risk because we are located throughout Europe,” says Haspeslagh. ‘But there are no longer regions without extreme weather. The bottom line is that we need more acreage for the same production.’

For the farmers it is a double-edged sword. Greater risks of lower or even failed harvests mean less security about their income. At the same time, customers are increasingly willing to enter into better contracts, says Van Oost. ‘Processors are no longer in the seat they were in seven to eight years ago, when there were surpluses. Both yields and the number of farmers are declining.’

It means that new surges of food inflation and a more expensive shopping cart, such as in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remain possible in the coming years. Haspeslagh: ‘From mid-May we will increase the purchase price of peas by 1 percent for each later sowing day. We cannot let farmers bear all the consequences of climate change. That realization is gradually seeping through the entire chain.’