A drought does not announce itself in a shop. It arrives months later, as a smaller wheel of cheese, a thinner supply, or a price that has crept up for reasons nobody explains on the label. Switzerland is currently watching that chain of events run in real time, and the middle of it is unusually well documented.

Grass, then milk, then cheese

The mechanism is simple enough to state in one sentence: when pasture stops growing, cows eat stored feed, and cows under heat stress on a poorer diet give less milk. Every complication downstream follows from that.

Swiss dairy farms are reporting exactly this pattern after weeks of heat and sparse rain. Milk volumes are down, and many farms have been buying in feed, which pushes production costs up at the same moment output falls. Worse, a significant number have started eating into the hay put aside for winter — in August, with the cold months still ahead.

The timing detail matters more than the headline. Reports from the sector note that milk deliveries in June were still running well above the previous year; conditions then deteriorated quickly. A season can look fine on a spreadsheet until quite late and still end badly.

The rule that makes it harder

For most livestock farmers, a fodder shortage is a purchasing problem. For producers supplying milk to certain protected cheeses, it is a regulatory one as well.

Tête de Moine, the Jura cheese sold with the AOP protected-origin designation, is made under specifications that prohibit silage — including wrapped bales. Silage is fermented, moist forage, and it is the cheapest and most flexible way to store bulk feed. It is excluded because the bacteria it can carry cause defects in raw-milk cheeses of this type; the ban is a quality rule, not bureaucratic decoration.

The consequence in a dry year is that these farms cannot take the obvious shortcut. They need compliant dry fodder, which is scarcer and dearer, and they need it in a summer when everyone else is buying feed too. Martin Siegenthaler, who manages the Tête de Moine interprofessional organisation, has said farms in the Jura are already feeding cows hay intended for winter, and that increasingly unpredictable weather poses a real challenge for mountain cheese-making.

Coming down from the alps early

Swiss alpine farming runs on a summer rhythm: herds go up to high pastures for roughly a hundred days, are milked there, and the milk is turned into cheese on the mountain. That season is being cut short in places. Cantonal officials have reported herds descending to the valley ahead of schedule, driven chiefly by a lack of grazing rather than by thirst — where drinking water runs short, it can often be trucked in or piped for a period.

Federal agriculture officials have said the aim is to keep animals on the high pastures as long as welfare allows, precisely because every week up there is a week of valley fodder not consumed. Bringing herds down early solves one problem by accelerating another.

The strain is not confined to farms. At least 151 municipalities have restricted household water use this summer, banning pool filling and garden watering — in a country that is, on any annual accounting, water-rich. Winegrowers in some regions began harvesting in mid-August for the first time on record.

What Bern has done

The federal response has so far been made up of measures that lower the cost of importing feed and ease cash flow, rather than emergency powers. Economics minister Guy Parmelin has pointed to the abolition of customs duties on hay and fodder imports, extended to maize from mid-August, alongside interest-free loans and the acceleration of direct payments already owed to farms.

He has also been explicit about the limits. Importing animal feed is itself a concern, because the drought is affecting much of Europe at once and everyone is shopping in the same market. And there is no state of emergency, on the government’s assessment that the situation can be managed within existing law. His stated worry is the next stage: bridging to winter, and what happens in spring if the winter is dry too.

The Swiss Farmers’ Union is asking for more. It has appealed to retailers to pay higher producer prices and to relax cosmetic quality standards so that smaller or misshapen produce still reaches shelves, and has called on cantons for interest-free loans with flexible repayment, plus federal funding over the longer term for climate adaptation on farms. It has warned that herds are being reduced, which will show up in the meat market, and has cited a disease spreading from warmer regions as a further pressure on milk yields.

Farmers’ representatives have said they expect losses this year to exceed the roughly 500 million francs recorded in the drought of 2003. That figure is an estimate from an interested party in the middle of the season, not an audited number, and should be read as such until harvest accounting is done.

Farmers solving it themselves

Some of the more interesting responses have not come from government at all. The farmers’ associations of Zurich and Schaffhausen have launched an online marketplace to match arable farms that can grow catch-crop fodder or grain maize with livestock farms that need it. The logic is straightforward: a farm with few animals and spare ground has capacity that a farm with a large herd urgently needs, and the two do not otherwise easily find each other.

It is a small measure, dependent on the weather cooperating enough for a late-sown crop to establish. It is also the kind of adaptation that tends to outlast the emergency that produced it.

One summer, or the pattern

A single dry season is weather. Whether any particular summer is made more likely or more severe by a warming climate is a question answered by attribution studies, not by how bad it feels while it is happening, and no such study of this summer exists yet.

What can be said without waiting is that the people affected are behaving as though it is a pattern. The head of the Swiss Cities Association has called for a national adaptation strategy, arguing many urban areas were built for a climate that no longer applies. Farming organisations are asking for long-term adaptation funding rather than only this year’s relief. In the mountains, cheesemakers are describing unpredictability itself — not heat alone — as the thing their production model was not designed for.

Sources

• SWI swissinfo.ch — heatwaves and drought hit Swiss cheese makers
• SWI swissinfo.ch — Parmelin on federal support measures
• SWI swissinfo.ch — the farmers’ union’s demands
• SWI swissinfo.ch — early descent from alpine pastures
• SWI swissinfo.ch — the Zurich and Schaffhausen fodder exchange