Environmental NGOs have criticised the recent budget statement for leaving a ‘monumental gap’ in the public funding needed for nature recovery. But what about the impact on food production, asks plant scientist Professor Tina Barsby. When independent assessments suggest that the Government’s current farm support policies are incentivising England’s farmers to produce a quarter less food, and with a recent Food Standards Agency report indicating that one in four people in the UK are still ‘food insecure’, what exactly do Ministers mean when they insist that ‘food security is national security’? In an increasingly unstable world, recovering from a global pandemic and facing the triple shock of war, spiralling energy costs and extreme climate events, we must be very cautious about pursuing agricultural policies which encourage farmers to adopt lower-yielding practices, or to take farmland out of production altogether. At the very least, we must properly monitor and understand the impact of those policies in terms of productivity and domestic food output. But it is still not too late to change course. UK research has shown that switching to a land sparing approach of focusing some land entirely on high-yield food production to allow more space for nature on unfarmed land would be far more cost-effective. Given the current Government’s budgetary constraints, and with such a strong commitment to food security, surely the potential of a policy approach which scientists say can deliver food production, biodiversity and climate targets at half the cost to taxpayers warrants closer examination?

  

I am increasingly concerned about the prospects for agriculture and food production in this country following the Chancellor’s Autumn budget statement.

 

Understandably, the immediate focus has been on the changes to inheritance tax rules and their potential effects on family farms. Rather less attention has been paid to the impact of the budget measures on domestic food production and, by implication, the availability and affordability of the nation’s food supply.

 

Ahead of the budget, environmental NGOs such as the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and the National Trust, argued that a farm budget of at least £4.4 billion would be needed to deliver a transition to ‘nature friendly farming’ in England. But Defra has been allocated an unchanged budget of £2.4bn, which in practice, of course, amounts to a real terms reduction once inflation is accounted for.

 

Although the budget for 2024/25 is topped up by a £200m underspend from previous years, these same NGOs are now crying foul, warning of a ‘monumental gap’ between the farming budget and what is needed for nature recovery. 

 

But what of food production?

 

Defra minister Daniel Zeichner MP is the Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs. Mr Zeichner recently stated: “You’ve heard the words: food security is national security. This is absolutely at the centre of Labour’s mission to grow the economy and actually underpins the agendas of multiple government departments and constituencies. So, food security is a shared mission of this government.”

 

The previous Government adopted a rather ambiguous (and unambitious) commitment to ‘broadly maintain current levels of domestic food production’, without making entirely clear whether that was in terms of physical output or as a share of domestic food consumption in the context of an increasing population.       

 

The new government has so far been less clear about what they actually mean by ‘food security’.

 

In their most recent column, Private Eye’s ‘Bio-Waste Spreader’ has picked up on this lack of clarity, noting that “there are many indicators to suggest UK food self-sufficiency is about to decline at a time of increasing global tensions and extreme weather caused by climate change”, and that “thanks to the introduction of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) in England – encouraging farmers to take land out of production to encourage wildlife – the area planted to arable crops is in decline.”

 

In the case of oilseed rape, of course, as previous SSA commentators have noted, UK production has already more than halved, reducing UK self-sufficiency in home-grown vegetable oil from 40% to 15%. Does that not represent a ‘food security’ concern?

 

Significant reductions have also been seen in UK production of field beans, with experts warning that the inclusion of legume fallows in some SFI options could create a potential green bridging effect as disease and pest levels build in the soil, seriously impacting the viability of growing pulse crops such as peas and beans in the future.

     

One independent assessment by Savills, using its 830ha Virtual Farm in the East Midlands to model the optimal returns available under SFI options by transitioning to more of an agroecology-based system, has estimated that after six years the farm’s crop yields would be 24% lower than conventional.

 

Yes, you read that right. According to the Savills analysis, current farm policies are incentivising farmers to produce a quarter less food! In its commitment to food security, our new government needs to evaluate in depth all these issues to understand the impact of its policies on domestic food production.

 

A recent Food Standards Agency report indicates that one in four people in the UK are still ‘food insecure’.  It is difficult to fathom how farm policies likely to result in reduced domestic production will improve the situation.

 

Bio-Waste Spreader also observed in Private Eye that: “UK yields per acre of all the main cereal crops and oilseed rape have remained static or even declined over the past 20 years.”

 

I’m not sure this is entirely accurate for all crops, particularly if this year’s exceptional lows are discounted, although average crop yields have certainly plateaued in recent years.

 

Importantly, this does not mean, however, that yield potential has also levelled off. Over the past 20 years, innovation in UK plant breeding has continued to deliver improvements in the yield potential of new varieties in the order of 0.5 -1% per year. If this was not the case, there would have been no new varieties approved over that period since, uniquely for plant breeding, marketing authorisation depends on each new variety representing an improvement over older varieties.

 

Over the 20-year period Bio-Waste Spreader refers to, the world wheat yield record, which routinely changes hands between the UK and New Zealand, has increased from just over 15 tonnes/ha in 2003 (Oamaru, New Zealand) to just under 18 tonnes/ha in 2022, (Lincolnshire, UK), an increase of 20 per cent.  

 

Meanwhile, UK crop yields over the same period have remained stubbornly flat, as the following graph demonstrates. In the case of wheat, the national average yield of around 8 tonnes/ha is dwarfed by the demonstrable yield potential of 18 tonnes/ha.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                     Source: Defra

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The challenge in terms of the impact on domestic food production, therefore, does not relate to a lack of innovation, but to an increasing ‘yield gap’ between actual and potential production.

 

For some growers, this will be the result of a conscious decision to exploit the additional yield potential of newer varieties by maintaining output at reduced costs, e.g. by reducing the use of fertilisers or other inputs, so optimising profitability rather than physical output. But for others, it may be that the increasing yield gap relates to a lack of independent knowledge or advice in terms of the field-level agronomy needed to boost productivity.

 

Many farmers still refer back to the days of the state-funded agricultural development and advisory service which provided independent advice and extension services to individual farmers. They are calling for a modern version in the form of an independent ‘What Works Centre’ for UK farming, to streamline and co-ordinate the sharing of agri-food research. 

 

As a former chief executive, I am firmly of the view that NIAB’s established trialling and extension activities might be uniquely placed to host a ‘What Works Centre’ for UK crop production. NIAB currently provides independent agronomy advice to a network of farmer members representing around 20% of the UK arable area. And this makes a demonstrable contribution to closing the yield gap among NIAB’s farmer members, whose average crop yields are more than 9% above the national average.  

 

But the bottom line is that in an increasingly unstable world, recovering from a global pandemic and facing the triple shock of war, spiralling energy costs and extreme climate events, we must be very cautious about pursuing agricultural policies which encourage farmers to adopt lower-yielding practices, or to take farmland out of production altogether. At the very least, we must properly monitor and understand the impact of those policies in terms of productivity and domestic food output.

 

That said, it is still not too late to change course.

 

A peer-reviewed study in 2022 by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Glasgow, published in the journal People and Nature, concluded that a land sparing approach of focusing some land entirely on high-yield food production to allow more space for nature on unfarmed land would be far more cost-effective than prolonging the current land sharing approach of paying farmers to adopt lower-yielding production systems. To achieve the same overall outcomes for nature and biodiversity, sharing will cost twice as much and reduce food production by 27% more compared to land sparing.

 

Given the current Government’s budgetary constraints, and with such a strong commitment to food security, surely the potential of a policy approach which scientists say can deliver food production, biodiversity and climate targets at half the cost to taxpayers warrants closer examination?

 

Professor Tina Barsby OBE is a plant geneticist and a former CEO of NIAB, where she led the implementation of innovative approaches to plant breeding, including the first public-good wheat breeding programme in the UK since the privatisation of the Plant Breeding Institute in 1987. She was awarded an Honorary Professorship in Agricultural Botany by the University of Cambridge in 2021.