Editor’s View: Lack of resilience leaves farmers vulnerable
Tom Bradshaw © Lawrence Looi/NFU In Birmingham this week for the NFU Conference, the theme was resilience.
The backdrop running right across the impressively large stage was a photograph of a landscape taken from the top of a very steep hill, making it look like one good shove could send speakers tumbling into the valley below.
How appropriate. We are all familiar with getting knocked down and climbing back up again in this industry.
See also: Defra overhauls SFI with £100,000 cap and 71 actions
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When president Tom Bradshaw was doing his opening address I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was symbolic of him having climbed a mountain on inheritance tax (IHT), or whether he still felt that he was standing on the edge of a precipice with everything else at stake.
And for Paul Tompkins, it was a journey one step from the summit of the NFU officeholder mountain after his appointment as deputy president, replacing David Exwood.
But why, you may be asking, was I daydreaming at this important event?
The aforementioned theme was an excellent choice – there is no more important topic than improving the bouncebackability of individual farms, and agriculture as a whole, in this vital sector.
Indeed, speaker Prof Tim Lang, a food policy professor, was stark in his warnings about the many vulnerabilities in our just-in-time food supply chains that look like an increasingly risky bet in a brittle world.
And Mr Bradshaw was blunt in his assessment that we have to deal with the world as we find it, not as we would like it to be.
He may have been speaking specifically about his dissatisfaction over the extent of the concessions that have been won on IHT, but he could have been referring to any number of issues related to farming’s resilience, or the lack of it.
It was discombobulating to witness the yawning gap between how seriously food and farming experts want to take food security and how casually government seems to take it.
But I kept drifting away at certain moments because it was discombobulating to witness the yawning gap between how seriously food and farming experts want to take food security and how casually government seems to take it.
Yes, Defra secretary Emma Reynolds’ speech was relatively well received.
Indeed, the £100,000 cap on the forthcoming Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 agreements in England was more generous than some had anticipated, even as Defra clamps down on the opportunities for some farmers to earn as much as they have in the past.
But the most generous assessment of its flagship environmental policy is that it is a sticking plaster strategy that may just about be fit for a status quo world.
I don’t think many farmers in the room will have been persuaded that it will do much to move their businesses closer to Ms Reynolds’ vision of a more productive, profitable or resilient sector.
And I don’t think Prof Lang will be persuaded that it will enhance farming’s contribution to helping keep our population fed when the next crisis comes.
Being ambitious on this is incredibly hard. Even Defra lacks the ability to act with autonomy without the blessing of the Treasury.
But as the fourth anniversary of the Ukraine war came and went, as foot-and-mouth disease was declared in Cyprus, and as Dover intercepted a record amount of illegal meat imports last month, the risks are no longer subtle and require policy to match.