As many of you will know, farming in Britain is facing serious challenges thanks to our changing world, politics and the climate. With such volatility in the markets, an already risky business is becoming too much for many farming companies and families.

After BREXIT, UK farmers lost a subsidy which we were given to grow food called the Basic Payment Scheme. While you may wonder why it is a farm needs to be subsidised to grow food which surely should earn it some profit, this is sadly not the case. UK food prices are some of the cheapest in Europe, even with inflation and the cost of living crisis. UK farmers are price takers not price makers. In other words, we have to accept the prices set by supermarkets or the world trade as we do not have much choice beyond these markets. The alternative is direct to consumer sales, such as farm shops and meat boxes, which can be very positive for businesses but require a lot of investment for processing, marketing and more.

So, what do farmers do in post-BREXIT Britain? Well, the government introduced the Sustainable Farming Incentive, which rather than subsidise food production, focused on using ‘public money for public goods’. The incentive offers compensation for farmers to undertake predominately nature and habitat projects on farm to deliver on government goals for the environment. This may include planting wild bird seed, hedges or trees. It also rewards farmers for growing low-input cereals, compensating lack of yield boosted by fertiliser with the SFI payment.

However, for those eagle-eyed readers, you may have spotted a key gap in the grand SFI scheme; food production. Many farming businesses cannot afford to farm without subsidies (for the reasons highlighted above) and so welcomed the SFI with open arms, turning over their arable farmland to bird seed and in some cases, low yielding cereals. The resulting impact is that fewer farms are growing food for people and animals in the human consumption supply chain. While the government has acknowledged this, there is still a worrying lack of understanding of the importance of self-sufficiency and the need for our country to produce its own food hand in hand with environmental programmes.

As a business, we are growing legume fallow, wild bird seed and undertaking various other SFI projects such as soil sampling over the coming years. While it is very challenging for a farmer not to farm food, we believe that there will at least be some benefit to our environment and to our soils, which will be allowed to rest from production after many years of arable farming. We have always sought to look after the environment around us while farming sustainably, and we plan in future to return to food production with this same mentality in mind.