The German drought apocalypse hasn’t arrived
The country is getting drier, but grain yields have held up surprisingly well. And there may be opportunities in warmer summers.
Dear Reader,
I spent much of my holidays looking out the window and wondering when the rain would stop. Suffice to say, I wasn’t anywhere near Germany.
We drove from the Rhine Valley up to the northwest of Scotland in late July — and didn’t see a cloud until we were within a few miles of my home village. I barely saw the sun after that. A high-pressure system squatting over the continent was acting like a wall against rainfall from the Atlantic. It all seemed to fall within a few square miles between the fishing villages of Gairloch and Lochinver.
When we made the return journey four weeks later, green turned to yellow and then brown the further south we drove. Fire alerts started buzzing onto our phones. Verges and hillsides looked scorched and lifeless. It was as if we had escaped just before Day X, only to return to a land that had been hit by the zombie apocalypse.
It was hard not to feel a sense of foreboding about what this barren landscape, an increasingly regular feature of recent summers, would mean for our future. And yet, as we drove through France and Belgium, lush fields planted with potatoes and other leafy crops offered a stark contrast to the dusty earth around them.
Back in my office, I noted that the drought was preoccupying the German media. The dry spell had caused “catastrophic harvests” in many regions of the country, Der Spiegel reported. “Drought destroys millions of tonnes of crops – consumers are now feeling the impact at the supermarket checkout,” the Merkur newspaper claimed.
On Tuesday, the German Farmers’ Association released its preliminary data on the size of the summer harvest — and it appeared to confirm the impression that the drought had wrought severe damage. The total grain harvest had fallen by four million tonnes compared with 2025, the farmers’ association reported. “Particularly in southern and western Germany, a lack of rainfall has led to poor yields and, in some cases, crop failures for individual crops,” said the association’s head, Joachim Rukwied.
If the government didn’t act now, many farmers would be driven into insolvency, Rukwied warned. His demands: tax rebates on agricultural diesel, €180 million in subsidies for farmers to buy fertiliser, and an exemption from the minimum wage for seasonal workers.
Ever more frequent drought, leading to more crop failures and, in turn, higher prices for all kinds of basic foods. That is a pretty bleak vision of the future. But does it actually correspond to reality?
Well, not really.
Since 2017, Germany has been going through a period of prolonged drought that hasn’t been seen since at least the 1950s. Data published by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research shows that 2018 and 2022 were particularly tough on farmers, with severe shortages of rainfall during the growing season. With the exception of 2024, drought has been a factor in almost every year for a decade.
And yet, here’s the surprising thing. Crop yields have actually remained stable or even increased slightly during this period, official data shows. The overall grain harvest might have fallen. But the amount of grain produced per hectare has not. This year’s yield is 69 dt per hectare, compared with 65 dt in 2010.
The farmers’ association claims that grain harvests have fallen every year since 2014, blaming climate change and stricter fertiliser regulations. But there is another simpler reason: farmers are planting out less grain. Whereas in 2014, some 6 million hectares of grain were sown, this year that number had fallen to 5.5 million.
Obviously, if you plant out less of a crop, you are going to harvest less of it once it has ripened. That tells us little about the resilience of a crop to climate change.
Dr Oliver Mußhoff, professor of agricultural economics at Humboldt University, confirmed to me that harvests have remained largely stable. “Advances in plant breeding, technology and farmers’ growing expertise have helped agriculture to better absorb weather-related stress,” he told me.
In particular, seed producers are focusing on characteristics that make crops more resistant to drought stress, while technological advancements are helping farmers to apply pesticides and fertilisers more precisely. “The question, however, will be whether these advances will be sufficient if drought and other extreme weather events become more frequent and more intense in the future,” he cautioned.
Less widely reported is that Germany had a record potato harvest last year. Was this down to good weather? Yes, but only partly. Farmers are also simply planting more potatoes than ever before. If one were being facetious, one could single out the record potato harvest and claim that climate change is actually helping to increase crop yields.
More seriously, though, what will happen if drought remains a regular feature of the German summer, as climate scientists predict?
Here too, it would seem, there is no immediate cause for apocalyptic gloom.
While there are obvious challenges, “there are chances to be found in warmer summers too,” says Martin Banse, a researcher at the Thünen Institute, a research centre that specialises in sustainable farming.
Don’t expect to see German farmers growing melons or olives, Banse told ARD. Grain fields will remain the norm, but winter grain will become more common than spring varieties because farmers will rely more on winter rainfall. Meanwhile, crops such as soybeans, currently rare in Germany, will become an increasingly common sight.
That leaves one final apocalyptic headline from this summer: that the “disastrous” grain harvest is pushing up food prices.
Ironically, German grain farmers aren’t just complaining about a poor domestic harvest — they also say that international prices are too low. The reason international prices are so low? A glut of grain. Last month, the UN’s food monitoring agency noted that cereal prices were falling due to “ample global supplies and strong competition from Black Sea exporters.”
Clearly, somewhere in the world it is raining.
Logically, if an abundance of grain is dampening prices abroad, that will have a knock-on effect on German prices. That doesn’t sound like a situation in which we need to worry about our morning Brötchen becoming unaffordable.
Day X, it would seem, hasn’t arrived after all.