NI farm fire costs up 73% in 2025 due to summer heat

You’ve just finished a long run in the combine, the tank’s nearly full, and there’s that faint smell of hot metal and chaff dust drifting up from somewhere near the engine bay. You tell yourself it’s probably nothing — it’s always something — and you keep going because the forecast says rain by Friday and the crop won’t wait. That split-second decision, repeated across hundreds of Northern Ireland farms during a hot, dry stretch, is exactly where this year’s sharp rise in farm fire costs is coming from.

Northern Ireland’s farm fire costs rose 73% in 2025, reaching £11.8m, and the driving factor was summer heat rather than the arson or lightning strikes that account for a larger share of losses elsewhere in the UK. That distinction matters enormously for what farmers here should actually do about it. If the problem were arson, the answer would be security lighting and locked fuel stores. Because the problem is heat-stressed, dust-caked, hard-working machinery, the answer is mechanical: vehicle maintenance, housekeeping around moving parts, and having the means to catch a small fire before it becomes a shed-destroying one.

Step 1: Treat the 73% figure as a jump off a low base, not just a new danger

Percentage rises sound alarming in isolation, but a 73% increase can mean very different things depending on where it started. Northern Ireland’s farm fire bill is a small fraction of the UK total, so a relatively modest number of serious machinery fires — a couple of combines, a few balers, a handful of tractors — can swing the percentage dramatically in a way it never would for England’s much larger arable sector. None of this means the heat risk isn’t real. It does mean farmers shouldn’t assume last year was “normal” and this year is a catastrophe; it’s more likely that 2024 was unusually quiet and 2025’s dry spell pushed several high-value machines over the edge at once.

Tip: Don’t panic-read the headline number. Use it as a prompt to check your own machinery and insurance position, not as evidence the entire sector is suddenly more dangerous than it was.

Step 2: Understand that this is overwhelmingly a vehicle-fire story here, not an arson or lightning one

Across the UK as a whole, arson and lightning make up a meaningful share of total farm fire losses, alongside vehicle fires. In Northern Ireland this year, the cost rise has been driven mainly by vehicles — combines, balers, tractors and the telehandlers and trailers working alongside them during long, dry harvest days. Hot, dusty conditions are the perfect environment for chaff and straw dust to build up around hot engine components, exhausts and bearings, and for a worn bearing or an electrical fault to generate enough heat to ignite that buildup. This is a mechanical and housekeeping problem, which is good news in one sense: it’s largely preventable with routine checks rather than expensive new security infrastructure.

Tip: Spend your prevention budget on maintenance and extinguishing equipment this year, not CCTV or gates — the risk profile here points firmly at the yard and the field, not the perimeter fence.

Step 3: Know what your insurance will and won’t cover before you need to find out the hard way

Most farm policies will cover fire damage to insured vehicles and buildings, but cover is rarely as complete as farmers assume. Excess levels on machinery claims can be substantial, and a serious combine fire can easily leave a farmer covering several thousand pounds themselves before the policy pays out a penny. Policies also commonly exclude or limit cover where damage results from a known, unaddressed mechanical fault — an overheating bearing that had already been flagged, for instance, or electrics that hadn’t been serviced despite visible wear. Insurers can and do ask questions about maintenance history after a claim, particularly for high-value machines. A fire caused by neglect is a very different conversation with your insurer than one caused by a genuine, sudden fault.

Tip: Keep basic maintenance records — service dates, bearing checks, any repairs — even informally in a diary. It costs nothing and could be the difference between a smooth claim and a disputed one.

Step 4: Run a pre-harvest fire-prevention check on every machine, not just the combine

• Clear chaff, straw dust and plant debris from around engines, exhausts, manifolds and turbochargers daily during harvest, not just at the end of the season.
• Check bearing temperatures on combines and balers regularly, especially during long runs in hot, dry weather — a bearing running hotter than usual is an early warning sign, not a minor nuisance.
• Inspect electrical wiring for wear, chafing or loose connections, particularly on older machines where looms have been patched over the years.
• Fit or check spark arrestors on exhausts, and make sure guards and shields around hot components are in place and not missing after a repair.
• Keep a suitable fire extinguisher on every major machine, and check it’s in date — not just present.
• Keep a water bowser or slurry tanker filled and accessible near fields being harvested in dry conditions, so a small fire can be dampened down before it spreads to standing crop or stubble.

Tip: Do the chaff and dust clear-down at the end of every working day during harvest, not when it’s convenient — residual heat in an engine bay overnight is a common trigger for fires discovered the next morning.

Step 5: Recognise which farms carry the least risk this year

Not every holding faces the same exposure. Livestock-only and grassland farms running little or no combine, baler or large arable machinery during the hottest, driest weeks are far less exposed to this particular risk than arable or mixed farms harvesting cereals through a heatwave. If your operation is mainly cattle or sheep with minimal tillage, the prevention steps above still apply to any tractors and handlers you run, but the intensity of the risk — and the case for investing time in it right now — is considerably lower than for a combine-heavy arable enterprise working flat out in dry, hot conditions.

Quick tip: if you only have time to do one thing before harvest, make it the daily chaff and dust clear-down around hot engine parts — it’s the single cheapest, fastest habit that addresses the exact cause behind most of this year’s machinery fires.

Recap

• NI farm fire costs rose 73% to £11.8m in 2025, driven mainly by vehicle fires rather than arson or lightning.
• The jump may partly reflect a low 2024 base rather than a brand-new trend.
• Insurance excess and exclusions for known, unaddressed faults mean maintenance records matter at claim time.
• Daily debris clearing, bearing checks, spark arrestors, extinguishers and on-site water are the practical defences.
• Livestock-only farms with little running machinery face much lower exposure than arable, combine-heavy operations.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is waiting until the machine is parked up for winter to clear built-up dust and chaff, rather than doing it daily during harvest when the heat and debris are both at their worst. A close second is ignoring a bearing that’s “running a bit warm” because stopping costs time during a tight weather window — exactly the trade-off that leads to the fires behind this year’s cost rise. Finally, many farmers only read their insurance policy’s fire exclusions after a claim, rather than before harvest starts, when it’s too late to close the gap between what they assumed was covered and what actually is.