Food’s back on the table

In an increasingly unpredictable world, ensuring a secure food supply is vital, but farmers are facing an extraordinary challenge in delivering not only for our plates but for the environment, says Rupert Bates

IT’S been a while since I attended one, but local agricultural shows used to be about cows with rosettes and vintage tractors, not speeches warning of a looming food crisis. “We don’t know what a food crisis is going to look like or what shape it might take. But we know that food doesn’t come out of thin air and it’s a hard thing to produce. Now we have the perfect storm of global production problems and political crisis,” said Sussex farmer David Exwood, vice-president of the NFU, speaking at the Royal Bath & West Show. “The future of farming is all about having a great environment alongside food production; it isn’t one or the other, it’s got to be both. We have to achieve clean water and air, increase biodiversity and our food production – from the same land at the same time. There are extraordinary challenges in that, but that’s what we need to do.” ‘From the same land at the same time’ should be adopted as a rural mantra.

Suddenly, exacerbated by a cost-ofliving crisis and the war in Ukraine, food production is back on the table. It should never have left it, pushed aside by a big green dinner plate. The Government’s big green combine harvester has made a dramatic U-turn – for rewilding Britain, read grow for Britain. Now its national food strategy feels the need to talk of ensuring “a secure food supply in an unpredictable world”. Not just any old food, but “sustainable, nature positive, affordable food” that supports “healthier and home-grown diets for all”.

Charlie Evans, director of CKD Property Advisers, says the war in Ukraine and its effect on global food supply has created a pivotal moment for farmers. Evans expects farmers to do well this year, but asks will they ‘cut and run’ while the price of land is strong, or take a long-term view and gamble that crop prices will remain high?

I blame it on estate agents, or rather their marketing priorities. A ‘farm’ comes to market and the headlines are invariably about the renewable energy opportunities, the chance to turn agricultural acres into wildflower meadows, the breadth of the residential portfolio and maybe some holiday lets. Buried in the particulars might be brief mentions of an actual in-hand farm with cattle and crops – in other words, food production. Buying a farm and farming it? How very quaint.

Two 4,000-acre wedges of farmland came to market in the spring – the Coldham Estate in Cambridgeshire and the Goole Estate in Yorkshire, both being sold by Urban&civic, the property business acquired last year by the Wellcome Trust, through agents Savills and Bidwells. “With the market for carbon sequestration so strong, it is possible that large-scale funds may look at these farms, but my hope is that they remain in food production. Recent events have refocused attention on national self-sufficiency. It would be criminal, in my view, if two prime food-growing farms were hijacked for non-food-growing purposes,” says Evans. To be fair, the estates’ agricultural credentials are highlighted, and wheat and barley, potatoes and onions get a mention amid the wind turbines and solar farms. If you want either of these estates, you need north of £40 million. From the same land at the same time? We shall see.