How farming in a post-Brexit world could be a chance to change the rules

Farming – whether you’re rearing sheep or sowing swedes – isn’t easy in the best of times. Price volatility, weather fluctuations, foreign imports and government regulation can make the odds of success look less likely than a lottery win. Toss in Brexit, and even the most stalwart farmer is feeling skittish.

The only consensus is that change is on the way. But what change? And do farmers – and we as consumers – have the stomach for it?

The future of food and farming in a post Brexit world isn’t straightforward. It involves labour and immigration – who is going to pick the fruit and work in the fields? It means trade deals – who will buy our food and what food will we import and at what cost?

It’s also about our overall agricultural policies and regulations once we’re no longer governed by Brussels and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has announced proposed changes to the farming system. Under those plans, the current policy of providing direct payments based on the amount of land owned would be scraped in favour of what is called “public money for public goods” with a greater emphasis on environmental protection and stewardship.

Getting it right is critical because farming plays an important role in the economy. British farming puts 60 per cent of the food we eat on our plates and uses 70 per cent of our land. It also supplies the British food and drink industry, which is the largest manufacturing sector in the country, worth over £100bn and employing 3.8 million people, according to a National Farmers’ Union report.

The largest private landowner in the UK is the National Trust and 80 per cent of their land is used for agriculture, says Patrick Begg, outdoors and natural resources director. Farmers are right to be concerned about a future that is far from clear. “Farming is a long-term business, and that sense of not knowing where the long-term is heading is very destabilising to farmers.”

open image in gallery

But he’s optimistic that the new approach will benefit farmers and consumers. “So we’re not saying at all, food production doesn’t remain at the heart of farming. It must and it will, but it can be shifted to provide more of those wider environmental benefits… it will put the health back into our soils, which is very fragile and vulnerable at the moment because of decades of asking our farmers to farm quite intensively.”

The National Trust is a member of Greener UK, a coalition of organisations who want to have a say in how farming – and the environment as a whole – is dealt with post Brexit. The RSPB is a member and senior policy advisor Tom Lancaster says it’s not only getting the policies in place, but also ensuring there is the structure in place to enforce them.

It’s this “governance gap” that worries him and many other environmental leaders who say we can’t risk further damage to an already fragile environment. “If you look at the Farmland Bird Index, which is a classic indicator for the health of the wider countryside, that continues to decline – it declined by around 10 per cent between 2010 and 2015,” Lancaster says.

The RSPB and other Greener UK members see Brexit as an opportunity to look at how we farm with a fresh eye. But how do you balance the need to maximise food production with the desire to protect the environment? Lancaster thinks the two aren’t mutually exclusive, in fact he thinks they’re mutually beneficial.

“We’ve always made the argument that investing in the natural environment can and does have real benefits for farming and for food production, as farming more than any other industry depends upon natural resources like soil and water and pollinators,” he says.

“So it’s not just about this moral case, as important as that is. There’s also a really strong economic case for why you would restore the natural environment, particularly for agriculture but for other sectors of the economy too.”

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones is the founder of The Black Farmer – a company that produces beef, pork, chicken and eggs. He thinks a radical change in farming post Brexit would be a positive step. “I think anything which is going to shake up the industry will be good for the industry in the long term,” he says.

open image in gallery

Emmanuel-Jones says we should move away from growing commodity products and instead focus on the premium and speciality market. “We have, for example in this country, a hundred different varieties of apple. So why in God’s name can you only buy four varieties of apples in the supermarket?” he asks.

One of the problems is a food system focused on high volume and low margin. You only get that combination, Emmanuel-Jones says, by restricting choice. “I think what needs to be looked at are the massive companies that have a big stranglehold on our food industry because what those guys want is to commoditise it,” he explains. “They don’t like the work that’s speciality. They don’t like the work that’s small because it means it then becomes a bit more challenging for them.”

Changing our food system could help farmers in other ways, says Begg at the National Trust. “Lots of people make money out of the food industry. The people who probably don’t make as much as they might proportionately, are farmers.” The retail sector also has a role in educating consumers about where their food comes from and its real cost, since most consumers still buy primarily on price, he adds. With greater transparency, consumers could reliably buy based on where it comes from and how it’s been produced, rather than price alone.

Could that change in a post-Brexit world? Could we as consumers take a greater responsibility for what we eat and where it comes from? Might we even discover on supermarket aisles, long forgotten fruits and vegetables?

We don’t have long to find out. In the meantime, worries are tempered with hope and a spark of optimism.

“I think the post-Brexit world is going be fantastic,” says Emmanuel-Jones, “because it’s an opportunity to change the rules.”