How climate change and red tape could be jeopardising UK access to affordable food

It might be tempting, given how much coverage has focused on it recently, to assume the forthcoming changes to inheritance tax regime are the single biggest issue facing farmers these days. 

But the reality is these tax changes come at a moment of extraordinary pressure, with farmers having to contend with a swathe of unsettling issues, many of which could prove existential for their livelihoods.

Put them all together and you realise that for many of those marching in the streets in London, inheritance tax isn’t the only problem – it’s more like the last straw.

Why does this matter for the rest of us? In part because there’s a deeper story here.

For decades, this country’s level of food security has been more or less constant. This country has produced roughly 60 per cent of our own food for two decades (the figure was even higher in the 1980s). But farmers warn that given all the pressures they’re facing, that critical buffer could be about to be removed, with domestic production falling and dependence on imported food rising.

Whether that eventuates remains to be seen. As of 2023 the amount of food supplied domestically was still 62 per cent of everything we consumed. But now let’s consider the challenges facing farmers (even before we get to inheritance tax).

The first of them comes back to Brexit.

Following Britain’s departure from the EU, the government is making dramatic and far reaching changes to the way it supports farmers. For years, those payments, part of the EU-wide Common Agricultural Policy, were based on the amount of land farmed by each recipient.

Alongside these main farm payments there were other bolt-on schemes – Environmental Land Management schemes, to give them their category name – designed to encourage farmers to do more to look after local wildlife. But these schemes were always small in comparison to the main land-based farm payments.

There were problems aplenty with this old scheme. For one thing, all told, it amounted to a subsidy for land ownership rather than food production. Nonetheless, for many farmers it was an essential support, without which they would have had to sell up and stop producing food.

Under Michael Gove, Defra committed to far-reaching changes to these subsidies. Farms across the UK would get the same total amounts, he said, but instead of the majority being based on how much land they were farming, a growing portion would be environmental subsidies.

When Labour came into government it committed to accelerating this process, with the result that by 2027, fully 100 per cent of farm payments will be for environmental schemes.

Whether this is the right or wrong move is a matter of keen debate within the farming community. Many farmers argue that the net impact of environmental schemes is to reduce the amount of land being farmed for food, and that the schemes serve to reduce their crop yields rather than increasing them. Defra, and environmental advocates, argue that unless the soil and local habitats are preserved and improved, Britain faces ever diminishing harvests in future.

Speaking of harvests, that brings us to another issue farmers are having to contend with at the moment – poor crop yields. The past winter was exceptionally wet, with the upshot that the latest figures just released by Defra show 2024 was the second lowest wheat harvest since comparable records began in the early 1980s.

Now, the whole point of farming is that it’s weather dependent – no two years are alike. It’s quite conceivable that 2025’s harvest bounces back from this year’s. But one projection made by climate scientists is that the coming decades could be wetter and more volatile, spelling more trouble for farmers.

On top of this is another challenge: trade competition. Following Brexit, the UK has signed two trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, which raise the quotas of how much food each country can export to the UK. Look at trade data and you see a sharp increase in beef and dairy imports from Australia and New Zealand.

In other words, UK farmers are having to contend with more competition even as they contend with worse weather and drastic changes to their funding model.

Nor is this where the challenges end. Because we might also be in the midst of something else: a secular slowdown in farming productivity.

Look at a very, very long-range historic chart of crop yields in the UK. You see a few interesting features. For most of our history, from the Middle Ages through to today, the amount of wheat we could grow in a given hectare of land was pretty low and pretty constant.

Now look at what happened in the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to a combination of artificial fertilisers, combine harvesters and other technological leaps, yields leapt by 200 per cent.

This extraordinary leap is the story of British farming for the parents and grandparents of those family farms tending the land today: ever increasing yields even as the government provided large subsidies for farmers. It was, in terms of pure yields, the golden age for farms – fuelled in part by chemicals.

But now look at the far right hand side of the chart – the past 20 years or so. The line is no longer rising so fast. Farm productivity – at least based on this measure – has slowed quite markedly. Yields are no longer leaping in the way they once were.

Or, to put it another way, it’s getting tougher to generate a return for each hour of work and each pound of investment.

This might all seem miles away from the day-to-day debates on farming today. But each of these factors matters. Together, they help explain why things are getting tougher for farmers.

But there’s a broader issue at hand here. Despite having left the EU and implemented far reaching policies such as these, this country hasn’t really had a proper debate about food.

Do we prefer to subsidise farmers in an effort to maintain our domestic food supplies at 60 per cent of our consumption? Would we rather ditch those subsidies and rely on imports instead? Should we favour the long-term health of the environment over short term food production?

These are chewy questions – and ones we really ought to be debating a little more. This isn’t just about inheritance tax…