A summer of extreme heat and drought wiped around 16 million tonnes off Europe’s grain harvest, with France hit the hardest.
Europe’s farmers spent this summer watching their fields dry out under one record-breaking heatwave after another. Now the bill has arrived. European agriculture is facing an estimated $3.6 billion in losses after drought and extreme temperatures cut grain production by around 16 million tonnes.
The scale of the damage is hard to picture, so one analyst put it in simple terms. “This summer’s extreme heat and drought has been unprecedented, costing Europe production equivalent to the entire grain output of Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands combined,” said Tom Lancaster, a farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based think tank.
The new figure is double an earlier estimate from Cocereal, a Brussels-based body representing the cereal, oilseed, rice and olive oil sectors, which had put losses at €1.8 billion.
Farmers are also dealing with a second blow. Diesel and fertilizer prices remain high, pushing up the cost of running a farm at the same time as yields have fallen.
France Hit Hardest by Europe’s Drought and Crop Losses
France bore the brunt of the damage. Its crop output fell by 5.8 million tonnes, with losses estimated at €1.47 billion, or around $1.65 billion.
The heat struck at critical moments in the growing season. It disrupted the filling of wheat grains and the pollination of corn, two stages that are especially sensitive to high temperatures. Some French farms reported losses of around 25 percent on winter crops, while sunflower yields dropped to about 0.7 tonnes per hectare, compared with a typical range of 1.5 to 2 tonnes.
Hungary, the UK, Germany and Spain also recorded significant damage to their harvests.
The losses went beyond grain. Estimates from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre show EU soybean yields down 15 percent this year, sugar beet yields down 11 percent and potato yields down 7 percent.
Farmers across the continent have described a summer unlike any they have seen. Rivers including the Rhine, Elbe and Danube fell to unusually low levels, and record-low water on the Danube disrupted grain transport in the Balkans, leaving crops piling up at congested terminals.
How Climate Change Is Driving Europe’s Extreme Summers
This year’s heatwaves began in late May and continued for months. Temperatures reached 48.4 degrees Celsius in Orani, on the Italian island of Sardinia, in July, and several countries broke national records for heat.
Scientists say climate change is making these events more likely and more severe. Researchers at World Weather Attribution found that the June heatwave would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago without the influence of climate change.
Europe is warming faster than the global average, and that trend is turning extreme summers from rare events into a regular challenge for agriculture. Each heatwave and drought puts more pressure on crops, livestock and water supplies, and on the farmers who depend on them.
The wider economic cost could be much larger than the farming losses alone. An analysis by Dutch bank Triodos estimated that this year’s heatwaves and drought could reduce gross domestic product across the European Union by around 1 percent in 2026, or roughly €180 billion.
With yields down and costs up, many European farmers are now heading into the next growing season under heavy financial strain, and the question of how to adapt to hotter, drier summers is becoming harder to avoid.
