Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

Nor were things easy for Furze. He went about looking lean and self-absorbed, with his blue eyes sunk deep into his tanned face. His temper was short; he was thinner, and not only in body but in soul, he had no smiles to spare for anybody; and when he spoke to Will or Will's boy or to his beasts his voice had a rougher note. He was concerned for his farm, and for his pride in it, and deep down in his consciousness was a raw-red place, the sore of an inward humiliation.

Things had gone wrong with him before; he had had wet seasons instead of dry ones; but he had pulled through with an indefatigable patience that had somehow contrived to find a smile. But this fight found him smileless. He cursed, and endured. He watched his meadows turn brown, and his stunted root crops starving in the baked fields, and the brook dwindling away, and Rushy Pool becoming a sheet of cracked mud. It looked like a piece of crocodile skin stretched tight across the mouth of a huge round dish. He had two more cows sick with mamitis; the milk yield was falling off; he was having to buy feed.