While the rain is putting a dampener on many summer holiday plans, it could have a more serious impact on crops.

Farmers say they are already facing potentially poor grain harvests for barley and oats.

“This is going to be painful for many farmer’s accounts. There have been a lot of downpours and crops have simply drowned,” Per Skodborg, a consultant with the agricultural consultancy firm Sagro, told the Ritzau news wire.

“The biggest problem is barley, oats and corn. The grain is not strong and in some places not worth harvesting with a combine harvester. You need warmth and sun, and that’s hardly what we’re getting at the moment,” he said.

Farmers are thereby facing weather-related problems at the opposite end of the scale to those they faced in 2018, when a long spell of drought damaged harvests.

Skodborg said he had been particularly busy fielding concerns from Danish farmers during the current season.

Neither have the effects of wet weather been limited to the summer months, with April this year having been the wettest April on record since the 1930s.

“It’s been an unusually challenging year, including before the summer. So we are going to see a disappointing return of barley and oats and a lack of straw, which there is a shortage of,” he said.

Consumers in Denmark should not be unduly concerned about immediate price increases resulting from the likely poor crops, he noted.

“You shouldn’t expect bread and flour to get more expensive. If it does get more expensive, it will only be marginally so because there’s not a grain shortage in that sense,” he said.

Some crop types – notably rapeseed – are meanwhile less affected by the rain according to Skodborg.