The 19th of July was the hottest day ever recorded in the UK, with temperatures exceeding 40°C. At 2pm the day after, I could smell smoke. I began to panic, but a scan of my fields reassured me that it wasn’t coming from our farm. The wind was blowing from our neighbour’s field, where a mile away an electricity cable—sagging in the unprecedented heat—had dipped into a hedgerow tree and started a fire.