For many German farmers, the heat wave in late June couldn't have come at a worse time. While barley was already ready for harvest across much of Germany, the drought struck other crops during a particularly vulnerable stage of development.
"This year is another difficult one for farms," Horst Gömann of Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia Chamber of Agriculture told DW.
Corn has been particularly hard hit, as the extreme heat coincided with the flowering period, he said. "We're already seeing some corn plants failing to form cobs. That, of course, essentially amounts to a total crop failure," Gömann said.
In corn, the energy is concentrated in the cobs. If they're missing, yields plummet dramatically.
The heat wave in June, with peak temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, hit other European growing regions even harder. According to a recent analysis by Coceral, the European association of grain traders, this reduced the value of the grain harvest in Europe by more than €2 billion ($2.3 billion), with France and Hungary suffering the greatest losses.
