A Cotswold farmer in what is seen increasingly as the Cotswolds' "Clarkson country" has shared his business plight with Punchline-Gloucester.com amid this summer's struggle in the face of crop-scorching temperatures and ongoing changes from Westminster.

Charlie Beldam farms an extensive area of land close to Jeremy Clarkson to the north of the county, near Broadway, from where he grows rape, crushes it, bottles it and markets it under the successful Cotswold Gold label.

But he said that the field-to-retail operation he runs, which produces his award-winning range of oils, now faces an existential threat due to this summer's lack of rain and the impact of new government Sustainable Farming Incentive, which has been brought in to replace pre-Brexit EU subsidies.

Under the terms of the SFI, he said that land in Gloucestershire he had been able to access for rapeseed production was no longer available.

"Many landowners have opted for the SFI and in total we have therefore lost about 1,000 acres for growing, which is a sizeable part of our usual coverage."

That change coincides with a summer which "might look lovely" he said, but is turning the farm operation into a into a huge challenge: "Our early harvest was poor with very wet weather and inconsistent weather patterns have spelt small seed pods and seeds," he said.

More recently, anyone out walking fieldside footpaths would notice large cracks opening in the land, he said, and patches of crops which appear to have been frazzled: "When you have days at 35 degrees, for rape, it can look fit at the top but be green at the bottom. Much of our crops this year have consequently been a write off."

This summer's average high temperatures follow the summer of 2024 which, he said, was also very dry and the conditions have been good for flea beetles, which are a specific menace for rapeseed growers.

This summer is tough across the board for Gloucestershire - for beans, wheat, linseed too - and while some many ask why we can't simply irrigate, the costs would be way too high for the margin of profit that can ever be yielded on these crops. Once we get near a drought, farmers using water on the land is also hardly a good look."

Exacerbating the fragility of profit amid a heatwave, mills working with farmers to produce commodities from crops are often now buying in cheaper harvests from mainland Europe, he said, further depressing the price any farmer in England can get for the produce grown here.

"If there is one thing concerned consumers can do to help us," he urged, it is to check where what we eat comes from. We are an island nation and we could be vulnerable to world issues which mean that our agriculture is crucial for our economic survival and if we buy food from abroad when we can eat what is grown here, we risk failing to protect that food source."

Beyond that, he added, more rain and cooler days would be just what the farmer ordered.

Any farming concerns in Gloucestershire for the ongoing heat coincide with a new report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECUI) which suggests that 80% of British farmers are worried that the "devastating" effect of climate change will derail their business.

The ECUI study revealed how 87% of farmers have seen lower productivity in the face of recent extreme weather. A further 84% had seen a fall in crop yields, and more than 75% had lost income. IN the past five years, 78% of farmers had been affected by drought and more than half blighted by heatwaves. In total, 98% of farmers said extreme weather had hit them.

Anthony Curwen, a farmer from Kent, told ECUI: "It's getting increasingly difficult to farm given the impacts we're now seeing with climate change. We've gone from drought to Biblical floods and back to drought in the space of just a few years. It's devastating and many of us in farming now fear for a sustainable future."

He added: "What we need most now from government is a bit of stability and some better support to help us become resilient to these impacts. If we want to retain a robust supply of home-grown food, we need to invest more into the soil, water and wildlife that build this resilience and bolster the fundamentals of our food security. In an era when the climate is giving us a kicking, we need government to have our back, not add to the uncertainty."