If a brief gale sweeps across the countryside in a couple of weeks’ time it will be the result of arable farmers breathing a collective sigh of relief that the harvest is in.

For only a couple of months ago it looked very much as though, in some areas of the country at least, there would be hardly anything to harvest.

Scorching temperatures in April and May, when on several days the temperatures soared unseasonably into the 80s, left hundreds of acres of cereal crops scorched and dying where they stood in fields where the soil had become scarred with deep cracks after weeks of drought.

Forecasts piled gloom on despair. The harvest, it was generally reckoned, would be wiped out. But as so often in farming it’s a case of swings and roundabouts, and the cool, damp weather that has clothed much of the country since the spring has in many cases redressed the balance.

And at the moment combine harvesters are going at it round the clock, bringing in millions of tonnes of cereal crops. The final verdict on both yield and quality is still the far side of the detailed sampling and analysis which experts need to carry out before they will make any official pronouncement, though preliminary indications suggest British farmers will be bringing in 14.5 million tonnes of wheat this year – just 300,000 tonnes down on last year.

And the prima facie evidence is that for much of the South West, at least, the harvest will be far better than could ever have been hoped for during the unrelenting Easter heatwave.

Some problems, however, are already emerging, among them one concerned with the quality of malting barley. Yields of winter and spring-sown crops are both down – with 85 per cent of the harvest completed the estimate is for a 20 per cent drop on last year.

But even more worrying is the high nitrogen content – the result of a lack of rain. That itself is an indicator of too much protein in the grain, which can reduce alcohol yield. And significant tonnages are coming in above the 1.9 per cent nitrogen content threshold beyond which maltsters and brewers won’t buy. So serious is the situation that malting barley growers are describing it as the worst harvest since 1984: the plus side is that anyone holding stocks of good-quality, low-protein grain can look forward to collecting a £50 a tonne premium.

Across the cereal belt of Wiltshire and Somerset the picture is generally brighter. And David Sedgman, who farms in Kingsweston, near Somerton, and is a member of the NFU’s regional arable committee, says he’s looking at a harvest which will be better than last year for all types of grain.

He’s well advanced with his operation, though, he says, the weather is still dogging it, with the weather lore associated with St Swithun’s Day proving remarkably accurate this year.

“It’s frustrating to be getting on well on a fine day and then the next to be held up by light rain,” he said. “But it’s annoying rather than disastrous. And the general picture is that in our locality we do not seem to have suffered from the drought problems there were earlier in the season. If the crops have been properly grown, and had sufficient inputs then the yields are generally good.

“The picture isn’t the same all over the South West and certainly not further east, where some crops went beyond the point of no return and just died. But certainly the summer has been cooler and kinder than it was last year. Last June and July got very droughty and that probably caused more damage than the dry weather in April and May did this year.”