It started innocuously, with some of livestock amid bucolic-looking Cumbrian countryside and an account of how many birds lived there. Within hours, a full-blown between farmer James Rebanks, who posted the photos, and environmentalist George Monbiot. Academics, ecologists and others piled in to cite scientific papers to argue whether grazing land with sheep and cattle is better for biodiversity or if it is best to hand grasslands back to nature.
The case exemplifies a fierce debate over the future of the UK’s farmland, and how to feed people while solving the biodiversity and climate crises. Agriculture occupies about 70 per cent of the country’s land today, and farmers receive about in government subsidies a year. Their land has been identified as an essential way to arrest declines in nature and meet climate targets by storing carbon.
The UK’s climate advisers say a fifth of farmland should be taken out of food production to store carbon, largely using trees, with the loss in land offset by increasing yields and shifting people’s diets away from meat. Now, post-Brexit, from being paid largely on how much land a farmer owns to being based on delivering “public goods” – from providing clean water to helping wildlife – while producing food.
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Henry Dimbleby, an entrepreneur who wrote last year, says one of the most interesting parts of the officially adopted strategy, which was announced this month, was the commitment to creating a “land use framework” next year to maintain food production and deliver benefits for nature and climate action. “We need to decide how our land can be used to deliver all of those benefits. It is incredibly political. There will be winners and losers, there are trade-offs,” he says.
Officials haven’t publicly given any clues to what the framework is or how it might work. But privately, they say at one end, it could see a set of new principles in the UK planning system, hypothetically leading to rules such as trees being forbidden on the highest-quality farmland (“grade one”). At the other end, it could revolve around “environmental offers” – what subsidies and incentives are on offer to use land in different ways, be it grazing cattle or letting it rewild.
Lord Deben at the , the UK’s independent advisory group on climate change, says the UK must start with the planning system. “What we want the planning system to do is to create a sustainable nation to help us meet our climate change demands, to produce as much food as we can at home.”
Dustin Benton at , an independent think tank, says money is more likely to be the way we change how land is used, as more interventionist planning measures may never be politically possible. He notes the 40 per cent of farms that are the least productive, largely on uplands, would go bust without existing land area-based subsidies, which are being phased out. The most economically rational thing to do would be allow the land to be used for something else, he says, such as making money from trading carbon by growing conifer forests on it or restoring peatland.
By contrast, the (NFU) – which represents farmers in England and Wales – argues that reducing farming emissions hinges instead on technology and small changes to land use, such as more hedgerows, rather than handing back large chunks for woods or peatland. Minette Batters at the NFU says it is “absolutely criminal” to suggest the answer is “more trees and we all went vegan”. She says grasslands grazed by livestock are a vital store of carbon.
Patrick Holden at the , UK – who favours less intensive farming than the UK has today, with less use of nitrogen-based fertilisers – champions maintaining beef and lamb production at roughly today’s levels. However, on a vision of sustainable farming differs in seeing chicken and pork consumption fall by three-quarters, to reduce the land needed for growing grain to feed the animals.
What is missing, says Benton, is a mechanism to bring about such extreme diet change. Batters agrees: “I think the challenge is, fundamentally, we have to produce what consumers want to buy.”
What any land use framework will have to account for is that not all farmland is created equally in the UK. About 57 per cent of food produced in the UK comes from one-third of its farmland, points out Lord Benyon, an environment minister. Marginal uplands don’t produce as much food as the rich soils mostly found in the east of England. Some farmers on marginal land may choose to quit – hundreds have already applied for a government-run since it launched in February – while others on high-grade land may farm more intensively in future.
“It’s perfectly possible to maintain our food security and even increase it whilst being more ecological, [and] being more understanding of the needs of farming to get to net zero,” says Benyon. It remains to be seen whose vision for how to use that farmland will win out. But Benyon is clear that change is coming. “It would be coming whether or not Brexit happened, whether or not Ukraine happened,” he says.
