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How do you keep soil healthy during a drought?

Christine ButlerCornwall
News imageBBC Man wearing a baseball cap is bending over picking kale from rows of vegetables. Some of the lines are covered in a mesh to keep butterflies and caterpillars off the greens. There is a polytunnel in the background BBC
Conor Kendrew said the density of the crop creates a canopy that stops the soil from evaporating water

It has been a summer of record-breaking temperatures, heatwaves, drought and hosepipe bans, leaving many farmers and growers struggling.

But one grower near St Columb, Cornwall, who operates a small-scale market garden, has been relatively unaffected by the drought, he has said.

Conor Kendrew has set up an irrigation system that uses a spring, a pond and any collected rain water and, because the site is 0.5 acre (0.2 hectare), sprinklers can reach a large part of the crop.

Kendrew said: "We invested very very heavily from the outset on a very good irrigation system. We could probably push pressure that is about six times what people's houses are sitting at, which means we can make it rain."

News imageConor Kendrew - a man in a baseball cap with beard and moustache, is holding a veg box containing spring onions, beetroot, aubergines, chard and cavolo nero.
Conor Kendrew operates a veg box scheme from his farm

Kendrew said prepping the ground for drought resilience was the single most important thing to do.

He said he used a lot of compost and did minimal cultivation where the residual crop was always mown and put back into the ground.

He said: "We are building soil organic matter and soil organic carbon all the time.

"The whole farm is powered by solar energy as well, so we've got the free water but we've also got the free energy. I'm not a grower who staring at a massively inflated electric or water bill each month.

"We've [also] set up an off-grid resilient system.

"We all kind of know climate change is coming.

I think, perhaps, I and my wife Rose have had a little bit more of an idea how real it is going to get quite quickly, so we've prepared for it.

"To say we're OK for water isn't to say everything has been a breeze.

"The heat itself stresses crops out tremendously, no matter how wet they are.

"Like everyone, I am shocked [at recent weather and heatwaves], but, like an engineer, you would sort of over design your system for this sort of thing."

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