Alarm grows in European farming over drought

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin May 3, 2007, 18:00 GMT

Berlin - A spring drought affecting parts of Europe north of the Alps is worrying farmers, who say they need rain within the next couple of weeks or crops will fail.

Mechanical rakes raise clouds of dust when they are drawn over many fields.

Helmut Born of the German Farmers Federation said this week: 'We are hearing from the meteorologists that the drought area stretches from northern France through to Poland.'

Affected farmers say the soil is as dry as it usually is in August.

Erhard Kunz, a 43-year-farmer at Alzey in western Germany who grows wheat and barley, says, 'Even if it rains now, it can't be a top harvest. I'd guess it will be about 80 per cent of potential.

'And if it doesn't rain in the next week or two, it will be a lousy harvest.'

After a rainy March, this April was among the hottest on record for many places in Europe, and dry too.

Reports are coming in from farm advisers in much of Germany that the rural world is worried, 'very worried,' according to Frieder Zimmermann of the Rhineland Palatinate farmers' union in Germany.

'We would normally have had 150 to 200 litres more of rain per square metre of soil by this time,' said Manfred Boehm of the Saxony farmers' union.

In much of Germany, the cost of irrigation would exceed net earnings for a crop, so it is not an option for rapeseed, maize and wheat.

Near Berlin, farmers say they are ready to plough under their weak winter crops because it is not worth harvesting them.

Market gardeners, with higher-value crops, have been spraying water in the Rhine valley, and say the warm weather is accelerating cauliflower and cabbage growth.

The lack of rain is also raising the risk of scrub fires and has reduced water flows in navigable rivers such as the Oder which has its headwaters in the Czech Republic and flows through southern Poland.