Season review: Harvest 2025 Approaches After Another Challenging Season

As harvest approaches, we’re reflecting on the key moments throughout the season. It has followed a challenging 2-year period in 2024-2025 for agriculture and crop protection in particular, with difficult weather conditions to work around, low market prices and rising input costs for growers to navigate, all impacting profitability on farm.

Staying Ahead of the Challenges
Visit our Seasonal Focus section for a roundup of the key challenges and developments from the season, including T0 to T3 updates, product news and launches, and updates regarding disease, weed, and pest pressures.

Read our full season review below.

Autumn Drilling and a Wet Start to the Year

Following a wet early autumn, conditions dried enough to allow reasonable progress with winter cereal drilling. A prolonged wet spell from January through February left fields across much of the UK waterlogged by March. This significantly disrupted early T0 cereal fungicide applications, as many were either delayed or missed altogether.

Spring Planting Delays and Early Crop Stress

Spring cropping was delayed until fields dried out sufficiently but at this point the weather turned especially dry through late March, April and early May, leading to slow crop growth, lower tillering in many cereal crops and early signs of crop stress, which also kept disease pressure in winter cereals relatively low through T1 and T2 application timings.

May Brings a Short Window for Recovery

Despite colder overnight temperatures keeping growth at check through April as well as the long dry spell affecting crops, warmer weather and rainfall events (in some parts of the UK) during mid to late May enabled a more rapid period of crop growth and development. This also signalled a small change in disease pressure (and pest prevalence) in some crops around the UK, with growers more active in applying later season ‘T2.5’ / T3 crop protection sprays.

Dry June Adds Pressure Ahead of Harvest

However, yet another very hot, dry spell followed through June, which caused more visible signs of crop stress from lack of rain and soil moisture, which has affected grain fill and yield potential in many crops this year.
Now in July, many crops are suffering across the country from dry conditions, with thinner crops senescing much quicker than normal, harvest is very close and growers will be concerned that yield and quality could be down in many crops.

Looking Ahead to 2025/26

With an early harvest likely (and already started in some areas), the Clayton team is here to support growers with guidance and products for the upcoming 2025/26 cropping season. This includes advice on pre- and post-emergence herbicides for cereals and oilseed rape, as well as autumn fungicide strategies for early disease control in OSR. Stay tuned—more updates will follow soon.

Continued Support for Growers

As a family run business, focused on providing high quality generic products formulated and manufactured in the UK and Europe, Clayton continue to offer a cost-effective and alternative choice to multinationals for our customers.
With proven quality, trust, close relationships and a clear focus on customer service, Clayton are fully committed to supporting our UK customers and remain agile as a business in finding solutions for growers to the many challenges faced today..

Expanding Our Reach in Europe

We’re also pleased to share news of our continued growth in key European markets, particularly France and Germany. Earlier this year, Hugues Hequet joined Clayton as Business Development and Sales Manager for France, helping to drive our expansion and support more growers across the continent.

Wishing You a Safe and Successful Harvest

Thank you for your continued support this season. From all of us at Clayton, we wish you a smooth and successful harvest.
For more information on our autumn product range or technical advice, please get in touch directly—we’re here to help.

Get in touch with our Technical Team:

Will Ridgwell – Commercial Manager – will@claytonpp.com
Martyn Rogers – Product Development Manager – martyn@claytonpp.com