Scottish Milk Heads South as English Drought Cuts Yields

Scottish dairies have started sending organic milk south after the UK’s hottest summer on record left English and Welsh farms short of grass and yield. Mossgiel Organic Dairy in Ayrshire had dispatched about 56,000 litres, two tanker loads, by 11 September, and turned down a further 40,000 litres it did not have.

Great Britain’s daily milk deliveries in the week ending 12 September ran 3.7% below the same week last year, a hole of 1.24 million litres a day on Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board figures. Those Scottish loads cover about 4.5% of a single day’s gap. They still show where buyers now look when English pasture fails.

Two Tankers Against a National Shortfall

Bryce Cunningham, founder of Mossgiel, said he took three calls in about 10 minutes from businesses south of the border asking what milk he could supply the following week. He said the interest was new for the farm and showed how fast the market had tightened.

“The drought has caused serious supply issues across the dairy industry,” Cunningham said. “Organic milk is generally quite difficult to get at this time of year anyway, but the drought has amplified that.”

He put the 56,000 litres at “relatively small beans” in dairy and “quite substantial” in organics. The home herd is 45 Ayrshire cows, and the company also buys and bottles milk from other organic farms. That is how two tankers left Mauchline at all.

HOW THE VOLUMES COMPARE

The 18.5 million litre figure is a summer heat loss, not the later weekly gap, and even stacked together they dwarf what one Ayrshire dairy can spare. Scotland is being asked to act as a hedge. The hedge is already maxed on the orders that reached Cunningham.

Why Scottish Pasture Held

The Met Office called summer 2026 the hottest UK summer on record, with a mean of 16.5°C, beating 2025’s 16.1°C in a series that starts in 1884. England, Wales and Northern Ireland each broke their own summer mean records. Scotland did not. It was the joint-sixth warmest summer there, and that split is why grass still grew on one side of the border.

SUMMER RAIN AND HEAT BY NATION

Scotland took 295.0 mm of rain against England’s 132.9 mm. Sunshine followed the same line: England had 133% of average hours, Scotland 99%. Fifty-four Met Office stations broke their all-time daily maximum. The season peaked at 38.2°C at Hartpury College on 13 August, and Lingwood in Norfolk set a June record of 38.0°C.

Dr Mark McCarthy, head of climate attribution at the Met Office, said a summer like 2026 is now around 130 times more likely because of climate change, and that in a climate without human greenhouse gases it would be a roughly 1 in 1,148 year event. In the current climate he put it at roughly 1 in 9 years. Dr Amy Doherty, who leads the National Climate Information Centre, said the records are breaking more often. Dr James Pope, a Met Office climate scientist, said summer 2026 would be about average for a UK summer in a world 2.5 to 3°C warmer than pre-industrial levels.

Cunningham said Scottish producers largely avoided the worst of the weather, though his own cows took some heat stress. Buyers in England noticed the difference before the official tables landed.

Heat Cut Yields Before the Grass Failed

Dairy cows start to suffer when the temperature-humidity index reaches about 68, roughly 22°C in moderate humidity, AHDB lead dairy analyst Susie Stannard wrote in a 13 July note. High-yielding cows can show stress below that. Warm nights stop them dumping heat, feed intake falls, and they spend more time panting and standing. Milk drops. Fertility can stay poor for weeks after the air cools.

Farmgate prices had already slumped from 46.6p per litre to 34.2p in May, and processors were running volume-management schemes, so heat was not the only brake. Stannard still isolated the first two heatwaves from those other drags.

THE SUMMER THAT CUT THE MILK

1. 26 May 2026: First heatwave peaks at 35.1°C. AHDB later puts the loss at about 5.8 million litres, with cows not back to prior yield until mid-June.
2. 26 June 2026: Lingwood hits 38.0°C, a June record. The second heatwave knocks production to 2.9% below the five-year average at the peak; AHDB puts the loss, with after-effects to 4 July, at 12.7 million litres.
3. 13 July 2026: Combined heatwave loss reaches 18.5 million litres lost to heatwaves, with a third hot spell then under way.
4. 1 July 2026: The GB milking herd stands at 1.57 million head, down 34,500, or 2.2%, on a year earlier, the lowest on the British Cattle Movement Service count.
5. Week ending 12 September 2026: Daily GB deliveries average 32.51 million litres, 1.24 million litres a day below the same week last year.

Spot milk firmed to 38-48p per litre, some 10-15p above the May farmgate average, a sign processors were scrambling for volume. Stannard said severe heat is likely to become a regular British summer feature and that the industry may need to treat heat resistance as a genetic goal. Processors, she added, may have to plan for summer supply breaks as a normal risk, not a freak.

Somerset Orchards Shed Fruit Early

The same map is showing up in fruit. Angus Morrison, co-founder of Lost Orchards, said Scotland had a bumper crop while heat and drought caused “calamity on the orchard crops for this year” down south. He said English apple growers are among the best in the world, “but even the best growers are having to contend with conditions that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage.”

In July, before the worst of the English drop was counted, Morrison called Scotland a sleeping giant of cider, “particularly with changing weather patterns.” Hay Farms at Easter Rhynd in Perthshire is among the orchards filling his presses, with farmer Fin Hay and Jamie Morrison of Lost Orchards working the same rows the cameras found this month.

WHAT ENGLISH ORCHARDS LOST

• Honey’s Cider, near Bath: Kimberly Jones said the orchard produced about a tenth of its usual apples and called the year gut-wrenching.
• Neil MacDonald, Somerset: Managing more than 1,000 acres, he said about half his apples fell before they ripened because the trees were stressed.
• Sampford Courtenay Cider, Devon: Alison McIlwraith said the farm expected about 10% of last year’s cider and would harvest only half its orchards.
• Sandford Orchards, Crediton: Barny Butterfield put the crop at about 70% of a typical year, a bit over half of last year’s pick.
• Thatchers: Harvest of 550 acres is due by mid-November, six weeks earlier than 30 years ago, with cider output about 15% down.

Morrison said his company is in constant contact with growers south of the border. “What we’re seeing is a really telling example of how climate change is beginning to affect where food can be grown and how businesses source it,” he said. He added that it is too soon to call a long-term pattern, “but certainly the changing climate is helping the fruit growing in Scotland and other areas better than it is in the south and Europe for that matter.”

Organic Supply Was Fragile Before Summer

AHDB’s organic series had already dipped below the previous year from May, and stayed well below the five-year average through the flush. Milk-year volumes from April to 6 June were 1.1% lower than a year earlier. Organic herds run harder on grass than conventional ones, so a dry south hits them first, and processing space for a seasonal organic flush is tight even in a normal year.

That tightness was public before this summer’s five heatwaves. Some coffee chains dropped organic milk last year when processors could not source enough, and grass-fed suppliers had been saying the pool of organic farms had no spare capacity left. Cunningham’s three calls in 10 minutes were the sound of that thin market meeting a weather shock, not the start of it.

He still could not find the extra 40,000 litres. “We’re obviously pleased to be able to help out, but it just shows you a sign of the times, you know, and how impactful this weather event has been,” he said.

Farmers Face a Second Tight Forage Winter

Grass is the cheap feed. In July it fell away in a week. Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit analysis of AHDB Forage for Knowledge data found growth at 94% of the 2019-24 average in the week ending 3 July, then 63% a week later. By the week ending 31 July it was 46% below that average. Less than a millimetre of rain fell anywhere in England in the week ending 21 July.

THE FEED HOLE IN THE GRASS

• Season outlook: ECIU’s central case ends 2026 at 81% of the recent average, in a range of 77% to 86%.
• The missing bulk: That is a shortfall of about 2,200 kg of dry matter per hectare.
• In cow terms: At 15 to 18 kg of dry matter a day, ECIU equates that to about four months’ feed for one cow lost from every hectare.
• The year before: 2025 already finished at 87% of average, so winter stores were thin before this summer started.

Tom Cantillon, a senior analyst at ECIU, said grass is the cheapest feed British livestock farmers have, “and this summer it has fallen to half its normal rate.” Holly Purdey, a farmer on Exmoor in Somerset, said there had been no regrowth on her hay fields, her only natural water source had dried up, and the water bill had “gone through the roof.” She was already eating into grazing she would normally save, which means more hay this winter.

NFU Dairy Board chair Ian Harvey said members were feeding winter forage and bought-in feed to keep cows going, and warned of shortages later if rain stayed away. That is the bill English herds will still be paying when Scottish tankers have gone home.

What the Drought Board Expects by Spring

On 16 September the National Drought Group said there were no status changes, with almost three-quarters of England remaining in drought after a dry spring and summer and a run of heatwaves. New modelling said the country needs 120% of typical rainfall over the next seven months for every area to be declared out of drought. There is about a one-in-four chance that around half the country is still in drought next spring.

The most likely path still splits north from south. Cumbria and Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire could move to recovery in October and back to normal in November. By the start of spring 2027, Devon and Cornwall and East Anglia would still be in drought on that path. Spring rainfall was 56% of typical. Summer rainfall was 64% of expected. Demand for water rose by as much as 30% on the hottest days.

Water minister Emma Hardy said the recent rain is not yet enough to replace what was used over six months. Environment Agency chief executive Philip Duffy, who chaired the meeting, said several reservoirs remain “concerningly low” and that a few weeks of rain cannot reverse the deficit. The government has put a £65 million package in front of drought-hit farmers, including up to £15 million for on-farm reservoirs.

The bigger worry for us all is that if this happens once in ten years, then that’s a hard thing to take, but you can recover from it. But what happens if this is the new normal? Is climate change hitting us quicker than we thought? We are in the middle of summer and we can’t graze animals and we can’t grow food because it’s too dry and too hot. So that’s a big worry that we’ve got for the future.

Bryce Cunningham, founder, Mossgiel Organic Dairy

Two tankers of Ayrshire organic milk will not refill an English dairy. They do show the new buying map: when English grass fails, the calls go north, and the farms that pick up have already run out of extra litres.