​Talking about the weather is normally a pretty safe bet in my line of work. This year, however, I’ve found myself shying away from it.

As one candidate put it to me recently: “Lovely weather, unless you’re a farmer.”

Harvest is always a hugely volatile time of year. Yields can be up or down, fields can be flooded or crying out for rain, and a few days of good weather can make the difference between getting a crop safely in or being left chasing the weather.

For most farmers, harvest is the culmination of months of planning, hard work and investment. This year, however, the exceptionally hot and dry conditions have brought another risk into sharp focus: fire.

Across the UK, we have already seen a worrying number of agricultural and countryside fires, with dry crops, tinder-dry field margins and extremely warm machinery creating the perfect conditions for fires to spread rapidly.

A combine fire is every farmer's worst nightmare. What starts as smoke from an engine bay or a small build-up of crop residue can quickly become a field-wide blaze, potentially destroying machinery worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and valuable crops in a matter of minutes.

A harvest with a heightened fire risk

The 2026 harvest has been unusually early in many parts of the country. In some areas, growers were cutting wheat before August, with the combination of heat and dry conditions accelerating crop maturity.

But an early harvest hasn't necessarily meant an easier one.

The same conditions that have pushed crops rapidly towards maturity have also left fields, hedgerows and surrounding vegetation exceptionally dry. With drought conditions affecting much of the country, the risk of fires spreading quickly is significantly higher.

And we have already seen the consequences.

In Cambridgeshire, a combine fire near Meldreth spread across around five acres of farmland and required around 20 firefighters to tackle the blaze. Earlier in the season, a combine and almost five acres of cut straw caught fire near St Neots, with crews from several fire stations attending.

And it isn't just combines that are at risk. Farm buildings, hay, straw and other agricultural machinery have all been caught up in fires during a summer where vegetation has been unusually dry.

The cost goes far beyond the combine

Away from protecting your team and ensuring their safety, the obvious financial loss from a fire is the machinery itself and, potentially, the crop surrounding it. But losing a combine halfway through harvest can have a much wider impact.

There is the cost of repairing or replacing the machine, the potential loss of the crop, downtime during a critical weather window, additional contractor or machinery hire costs and the knock-on effect on the rest of the harvest operation.

For a contractor, the implications can be even more significant. A combine sitting in a field isn't simply a piece of machinery – it could be responsible for harvesting hundreds or even thousands of acres.

And, of course, there is the biggest consideration of all: people. Machinery can be replaced. People cannot.

What can we learn from Australia?

In Australia, it was standard practice to be prepared for these eventualities. We did a number of things to stop the risk. The conditions were obviously different, and I'm not suggesting the UK needs to adopt the same approach wholesale. But there were several things we did as standard practice that have made me wonder whether there are lessons we could take from them as our summers become hotter and drier.

• All machinery parked up on gravel at the end of the day – if there happened to be a fire, the kit would still be safe.

• Blowing down the machinery, every single morning.

• Water was readily available - water buts across the farm, and ute’s with water always filled up so we could get to neighbouring farms and further away fields with water within minutes.

• The local council monitoring the weather – not just the heat but wind too. Once over a certain amount, no farm machinery was to be driven, even if not being used in the fields – until the ban was officially lifted.

• Investment was made on farm, and designed with fire in mind. The farm I worked on had dirt tracks between fields, creating natural breaks that could help prevent a fire from spreading across large areas of acreage.

It’s got me thinking, is this going to be the new normal for us in the UK? Hot, dry summers aren't new, and farmers have always had to contend with machinery fires during harvest. But if temperatures of 30°C+ become increasingly common during harvest, should we be thinking differently about fire prevention?

Perhaps not to the same extent as Australia. The climates, landscapes and farming systems are different.

More readily available water. Better-defined firebreaks. More rigorous machinery cleaning routines. Greater monitoring of wind conditions. Clearer guidance on when machinery should and shouldn't be operated.

The NFU already recommends regular maintenance and cleaning of combines, with particular attention paid to areas where dust and crop residue can accumulate. Fire extinguishers should be easily accessible and machinery should be checked regularly throughout the day.

What do future harvests look like?

The 2026 season has brought an unusually early harvest alongside drought and extreme heat. As the climate and weather patterns continue to change, risks that farmers have always had to manage may need to be considered more seriously.

For farmers, contractors, machinery manufacturers and insurers, that could mean putting greater emphasis on prevention.

Could we see more widespread adoption of automatic fire suppression systems on agricultural machinery? Should they become standard? Will weather monitoring play a greater role in deciding when machinery can operate? And will fire planning eventually become as routine as preparing for a wet harvest?

One minute a combine can be working normally and, the next, a small mechanical issue or build-up of dry material can turn into a serious fire.

For everyone involved in harvest – farmers, contractors, machinery technicians, grain merchants and those working further along the supply chain – it's another reminder of just how many variables have to come together to get a crop safely from field to end user.

Much of the focus this summer will, understandably, be on yields, grain prices, quality and the speed of harvest.

Having experienced first-hand just how seriously fire risk can be treated in Australia, I'm interested to see whether this is something the UK agricultural industry will increasingly need to plan for too. Because if this year's weather has taught us anything, it's that the conditions farmers work in can change very quickly.