Can British farming afford another neonics moment?

When British farmers lost neonicotinoid seed treatments for oilseed rape, they began an expensive experiment in how to grow a crop without their main defence against cabbage stem flea beetle.

More than a decade later, the lessons extend well beyond crop establishment, with Britain becoming increasingly dependent on imports to supply its crushers, food manufacturers and livestock sector.

See also: Find all our oilseed rape content in one place 

That experience should matter now, as the prospect of closer alignment with EU pesticide rules raises questions over glyphosate’s future as a pre-harvest desiccant.

Having spent years rebuilding growers’ ability to establish oilseed rape, the industry could face another upheaval in how they harvest it.

The difficult question is how to change crop protection policy without losing the markets and infrastructure farmers need while they adapt.

The neonicotinoids experience shows those losses can accumulate long before research delivers practical answers.

For United Oilseeds managing director James Warner, keeping that infrastructure intact was a central reason for launching OSR Reboot in 2024.

With domestic demand for rapeseed at about 2m tonnes, he could see a growing mismatch between what British crushers wanted to buy and what British farmers could reliably produce.

Defra records UK production of just 824,000t in 2024, the lowest in more than 40 years.

And its latest Food Security Digest, published in December 2025, identifies difficulties controlling flea beetle as a driver of declining production and greater dependence on imports of vegetable oils.

Although rapeseed imports can sustain throughput for domestic crushers, further closures would leave Britain buying finished oil from overseas, with little prospect of recovering the processing capacity.

Import dependence

Crushers’ association Scopa has already seen how falling production changes the supply chain.

Secretary general Angela Bowden explains how reduced domestic supplies contributed to the closure of Cargill’s Hull plant in 2022.

“It has made the crushing industry massively reliant on imported OSR,” she says.

“Pre the neonics ban, we were importing around 10% of our needs and this had been stable for some time. After 2018, import levels rose steeply to around 55% of UK supply at the peak.

“There is availability on the world market, but this is an expensive option and adds complexity for buyers in terms of checks and tests.”

The contraction has also stripped business from the firms supplying and handling the British crop.

Mr Warner calculates that a fall in annual production from 2.7m tonnes to about 900,000t represents roughly 62,000 lorry-loads of home-grown seed no longer moving through the supply chain, with associated work for stores, laboratories and merchants all gone.

He estimates that the loss of 500,000ha of plantings also removed demand for about 167,000 bags of certified OSR seed.

Although replacement crops and imports generate their own business, the figures illustrate how widely the consequences of a crop’s decline spread.

Feed implications

And there is another issue for the livestock sector. British seed delivered to a crusher can provide the inward load for a vehicle collecting rapeseed meal, an important protein source for livestock, particularly ruminants.

At Erith, near Dartford, losing those seed deliveries can leave hauliers travelling in empty to collect meal.

This means a £30/t round trip previously shared between two loads at £15/t each becomes a £30/t charge borne entirely by the feed.

Mr Warner says the result is there’s a “really big knock-on impact” on the animal feed sector.

He fears weakening domestic production will deepen reliance on overseas feed, including soya with all its deforestation implications, alongside the growing dependence on imported oil.

Mr Warner also argues that adaptation to life without neonicotinoids has been harder because overseas competitors retain options British growers have lost.

“If we’re going to ban something here, you have to have a level playing field,” he says.

“We can adapt to different regulations as long as those regulations are fair.”

He therefore calls on government to examine where replacement supplies will come from, and under what production rules, before banning actives in future.

Environmental impact

There is, however, evidence that restricting neonicotinoids reduced environmental exposure of the chemicals.

A British study found residues of the three restricted chemicals in 52% of honey samples in 2014, falling to 23% in 2015, following the first OSR drilling season without routine access to those seed treatments.

Water monitoring also shows declining concentrations of thiamethoxam and clothianidin, although Defra’s chief scientific adviser notes that clothianidin’s decline has been slower and may be becoming less consistent.

The comparable monitoring series begins in 2016, so it cannot isolate the effect of the earlier OSR restrictions from subsequent withdrawals on other crops.

But United Oilseeds argues that the environmental assessment must also account for the loss of flowering OSR, which provides pollen and nectar for bees and other pollinators, alongside the benefits of reduced pesticide exposure.