This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

I grew up on a farm and I remember the way the weather featured in our lives. Anxiety was always there about the comings and goings of rains and sun – the frosts, the winds, the aberrations from what we felt should be, alongside with the recognition that there was no perfect and reliable pattern of the year.

I don’t live on a farm now, nor even in the countryside, and I’ve been removed for long enough not to know at first hand how those aberrations have changed. I’ve not even been gardening this year, but a gardening friend tells me that everything is two weeks early.

And, well, yes, there have always been years that play out like that, in which berries are early, or berries are late, or the brambles turn to squish before you can even stuff one in your mouth.

But the worry is about something bigger than that. In England, according to Kathryn Brown, the director of climate change and evidence at the Wildlife Trusts, the trees are dropping leaves early due to stress, and there is a risk that wildlife will not have the food it needs later in the season.

Last week, Jeremy Clarkson was declaring on X, 'It looks like this year’s harvest will be catastrophic. That should be a worry for anyone who eats food.” (Now and again, I wonder if the nation's one-time favourite petrolhead could turn into a treasured environmentalist and this gives me hope.)

Meanwhile, in the United States right now, North Carolina has been swept by Hurricane Erin, which is weakening and heading our way, promising not destruction but rain and an end to the dry spell. My thoughts, though, are for the farmers the other side of the Atlantic, and, in particular, a North Carolina devastated by flooding only last year by Helene.

One 2024 article on those NC farmers, quoted Sandi Kronick, CEO of Happy Dirt, an organic distribution service, saying, “Many farmers that I work with have said they used to think they needed to budget for a bad season every seven years and now it’s really every three years. But even then, being financially prepared for a bad season is one thing.

“Nobody budgets for what Helene just did to farms in western North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. The scale of Helene is not something that any farm would ever think to plan for.”

Was last year an aberration, a new........

© Herald Scotland