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This is really striking here behind me. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. This is the newest reservoir, one of three reservoirs on one of Britain's largest farms called Elveden Estate in Suffolk. And while it should be able to hold around 200 Olympic size swimming pools worth of water, as you can see it's always completely dry. Usually at this time of year, middle of August, we would expect it to be at 3 to 4 m deep. So, as you can see, I would be underwater in an average year. The real challenge is making sure we've got enough water here for the rest of the season.
The farm say they've had to fork out hundreds of thousands of pounds in irrigation and electricity costs because of the severe drought the UK has seen recently. And that's all for its vast collection of crops including vegetables like onions and potatoes as well as cereal crops like rye, barley, and wheat. With costs so high, could the price we pay for groceries go up as a result? Depending on how the drought progresses, there's a chance that we may see some food uh commodities increase. Um particularly as we see actually this drought isn't necessarily confined to the UK. We also see markets like Western Europe in
France, Spain, Northern Africa where actually some of the countries may we may rely on to import some of the food and food produce when we can't produce it ourselves are also experiencing dry conditions. So, this in the short term might have some supply issues on certain products. And we also might see a change in the size and the quality of the products as we tackle the weather in this the UK.
