Opinion: Government seems oblivious to environmental crises

Just as La Coupe de Monde was kicking off in France last month, we were breathing hot sighs of relief as we brought in our last load of Fuggles hops, completing the 2023 Hampton hop harvest – our warmest harvest yet.

Hops don’t get much airtime across the pages of Farmers Weekly, and understandably so, with fewer than 55 hop growers left in the UK.

We may be a nation of thirsty beer drinkers and ardent brewers, but we don’t drink many of our own hops.

See also: Opinion – why I’m on board with beavers as a farmer

About the author

Molly Biddell

Molly Biddell works on her family’s farm in Surrey, in tandem with her role as head of natural capital at Knepp Estate. She previously spent time working in a research team for a rural consultancy firm, after graduating from Cambridge with a geography degree. 

Read more articles by Molly Biddell

Despite the decline of the UK’s hop industry from its glory days in the 1800s, we’ve proudly stuck at hops – our garden in Surrey having existed since the 1600s.

We grow, pick and dry the hops on the farm before they head off to breweries across the UK. 

The greatest threat facing our hops today is climate change. Heat and a lack of rain batter our yields, and with rising temperatures a dead cert, we are doing everything we can to increase the environmental resilience of our enterprise.

We are (one of the first?) hop farms in the UK proactively incorporating regenerative biological principles back into our chemically reliant system.

We have sown pollinating cover crops and introduced a flying flock of sheep to nibble the green cover and deposit dung.

Biological control reduces our red spider risk and we are trialling digestate as fertiliser. All good Groundswell-enthused stuff, but not easy.

Witnessing the impacts of climate change on our farm (whether it is scorched hops or flooded pasture) makes the government’s shambolic U-turns on climate and environmental policy even harder to stomach.

Dithering and backtracking on net zero, nutrient neutrality and biodiversity net gain – regulation that could make us world leaders in combatting the impending environmental crises – confirms that the government has no idea of the reality of ecosystem collapse and crop failure that we are already experiencing first hand.

Government’s pre-election short-termism is infuriating. We are a sector ready to deliver solutions – read environmentally resilient beer – and restore ecosystems, but we need to know the government is behind us.