With global concerns over food security and rising food and energy price inflation, the UK government seems to have recognized the importance of having a productive domestic agriculture.
But reports that one of Britain’s largest landowners, the National Trust, is taking back large tracts of productive farmland from long-term tenants to plant trees and regrow, and encourage low-yield farming on some of our most fertile soils, underscores the urgent need Need for a coherent land use strategy that recognizes the importance of food production.
Many have interpreted the government’s recent food strategy as a welcome change in policy direction, signaling renewed recognition by government ministers of the strategic importance of domestic agriculture and food production.
The war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis will have played an important role in the government’s thinking.
For example, Defra’s nutrition plan commits to “broadly maintain current levels of domestic food production”, develop a new horticultural strategy and invest £270m in research and innovation by 2029 to improve productivity, sustainability and resilience at farm level .
Ministers have also committed to developing a land use strategy by 2023 which, if followed by the three compartment approach advocated in Henry Dimbleby’s original National Food Strategy document The Plan, would also represent positive policy change The scientific evidence supports a land-sparing rather than a land-sharing approach.
Based on the thinking of conservation scientists Professor Andrew Balmford and Professor Rhys Green of the University of Cambridge, this creative three-compartment vision for future land use provides space for a combination of natural habitat, low-intensity farming and high-yield, high-tech -Agriculture – follows the science and, if implemented correctly, could deliver a more sustainable balance in terms of food production, resource use, conservation and climate action.
As Professor Balmford noted in October 2021 (in the Journal of Zoology), most species would fare “least poorly” under a land-conserving approach – with high-yielding production that meets food demand from a relatively small area farmed and frees up space for Preservation of intact habitats in the rest of the landscape.
Building on this model in the UK setting, the three-compartment model recognizes that a limited number of cropland types do better under low-intensity farming systems, hence the provision of a third compartment alongside high-yield agriculture and areas set aside for nature .
However, the allocation of land to each of these three compartments will be the determining factor in the ultimate success of such a strategy.
Until a more nationally representative picture of the optimal allocation for each compartment was developed, the scientists involved were cautious in estimating the relative contribution of each land-use option.
But it’s certainly not an even tripartition. Based on the detailed analysis already available for two pilot regions – Salisbury Plain and The Fens – I do not think it unreasonable to propose a rough estimate of 60% high performance agriculture, 25% conservation and 15%. Low-intensity farming for the whole country.
In my view, it is crucial to have an early idea of what a science-based assessment of future land-use allocations might look like, before too much of our productive acreage of rewilding, tree planting, or low-yield management systems such as is classified as organic and before Too much public money is earmarked to reward less productive farming systems when the scientific evidence tells us to focus on high-yield farming.
In fact, the development of a coherent land-use strategy — which provides a science-based assessment of the competing demands and priorities for this valuable resource — should have preceded each of the policy options being developed by Defra under the Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMs). , be it in relation to low-input agriculture, local conservation or landscape restoration.
In its report on ELMs in January this year, the House of Commons Budget Committee criticized the UK government for not having a clear plan for land use and food production.
Two cases involving the National Trust – one of the UK’s largest landowners – underscore the risks of pursuing certain land use options without a clearer understanding of how they might impact broader policy objectives. This is especially true now that national food security and the goal of maintaining current levels of food production are embedded in our national food strategy.
The first concern reports that the National Trust is reclaiming significant tracts of productive farmland from long-term leaseholders for rewilding and tree planting projects.
Those affected suggest the move is financially motivated, as the Trust seeks lucrative grants for landscape-scale restoration of nature at the expense of its leased farms – and the food they have historically produced.
The Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) has called the policy dead wrong. “It’s a vanity project, driven by the current media hype surrounding rewilding, and we don’t think it’s based on solid science,” TFA chief executive George Dunn told Farmers Weekly.
The second example, reported again in Farmers Weekly, showed how the National Trust’s flagship farm at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire is showing the way to a carbon negative future for organic wheat production.
From a net-zero perspective, that sounds impressive, but in terms of land use policies, is this the most efficient and sustainable use of some of the country’s most productive arable land?
Yields of the KWS Siskin milling wheat variety at Wimpole Farm were a meager 5.19 tonnes per hectare, well under half the non-organic average, and the resulting crop sold for more than £100 per tonne premium over conventional wheat.
So sustainable, but only for a privileged few.
In terms of land use, former UK “food security “champion” Professor Tim Benton has extensively studied the comparative environmental impacts of organic versus conventional farming, concluding in a 2013 article in the Journal of Applied Ecology that “the relatively low Yields from organic farms can result in larger areas of land being brought into agricultural production (locally or elsewhere) at a cost to biodiversity far greater than the benefits of organic on-farm practice.” Since grain production per unit area in organic fields is 54% lower than in conventional fields, Professor Benton advised that organic production be concentrated on more marginal areas as a result.
This may have been an early incarnation of the three-compartment model, but it again underscores the importance of developing a coherent land-use strategy that reconciles competing demands for food production, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, forestry, flood management, etc., and does so based on sound evidence scientific knowledge and evidence, not the latest media hype or celebrity eco fads.
* David Hill farms early generation grain seed, grass seed, canola, sugar beet and spelled wheat in central Norfolk. The farm also operates three processing plants that add value to their own and other farmers’ crops. David is a Nuffield Scholar and a member of the Global Farmers Network. A keen advocate of new technology in agriculture, he was one of the first farmers to undertake trials of GM sugar beet in the UK in the late 1990s as part of the government’s field trials to evaluate GM crops.
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