This document sits in Section Three, The Wider Conversation. Agriculture policy raises contested questions about land use, subsidy design and the trade-offs between food production, environmental restoration and energy generation, where reasonable people disagree. The Generational Reset sets out the strongest arguments on all sides, including steel man cases for positions it ends up challenging, and bases every conclusion on evidence rather than ideology.
Executive Summary
Britain grows about 16% of its fresh fruit and about 62% of all the food it consumes, while owning some of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. A country that can't feed itself isn't strategically sovereign. It depends on supply chains it doesn't control, weather it can't predict and trade relationships it may not be able to keep. This is mainly an argument about national resilience, not about the environment, and it should win support across the political spectrum.
UK food self-sufficiency, measured as domestic production against total supply, has fallen from around three-quarters in the late 1980s1 to 62% in 2023. Fresh vegetables are at 53%, the lowest since records began in 1988, and fresh fruit at 16%.2 Over a third of England's principal farmers are 65 or older, and fewer than 7% are under 35.3 Post-Brexit shortages of seasonal labour have left crops unpicked. The main farm payment scheme in England, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, closed to new applicants in March 2025 because its budget was used up, leaving farmers who hadn't yet applied without a route in.4 For decades British agriculture has been treated as a legacy subsidy recipient rather than a strategic national asset.
This pillar makes three connected arguments:
- Food sovereignty is a defence and resilience issue, not only an agricultural one. The fragility of UK food supply chains is the same kind of problem as the energy dependency the Ukraine war exposed.
- Agricultural robotics, now arriving at commercial scale, is a real and already-deploying answer to the post-Brexit seasonal labour shortage, not a speculative one.
- Restoring peatland at scale is carbon, flood and water infrastructure, not conservation, and should be funded as such.
A fourth idea is worth taking seriously but is deliberately kept out of the core argument: agrivoltaics, combining solar generation with crop production on the same land. It is at an early stage, its economics depend on assumptions not yet proven at commercial scale, and building a national food strategy around it would be premature. It is covered in detail in a separate working paper.
The three elements reinforce each other. Together they describe a concrete, achievable reform of British agriculture that improves food security, reduces dependence on imports, creates skilled jobs and restores damaged landscapes. Looking at worst-case scenarios strengthens the case rather than weakening it: the investment makes sense across the full range of climate and trade outcomes, not only the optimistic ones.
Key Proposals
Open National Wealth Fund lending to medium and small farms. With cooperative financing structures so farms below the capital threshold can take part in capital-intensive upgrades, not just large landowners.
Fund peatland restoration at serious scale. Through carbon market revenues, public infrastructure investment, and ELMS payments at genuine market compensation rates.
Set an explicit food self-sufficiency target. With a public monitoring register and annual reporting, treating food security as a strategic objective equivalent to energy security.
Develop a national agritech skills pipeline. Vocational reform, apprenticeship standards, and higher education programmes calibrated to robotics-integrated farming and precision agriculture.
1. Why Agriculture Has Its Own Pillar
Most pillars in The Generational Reset deal with how the state organises services for citizens. Agriculture is different. It is the physical base everything else rests on, more fundamental than roads or broadband. A working health system, a stable economy and a credible defence all depend on a food system that works. Britain has treated agriculture as a sectoral interest and a legacy subsidy recipient for decades. That mismatch between its strategic importance and how policy treats it is exactly the kind of failure this project sets out to identify and fix.
The strategic case starts with a simple observation. The UK's dependence on imported food is the same kind of problem as its past dependence on imported energy. The Ukraine war made visible what energy analysts had argued for years: relying on supply chains outside your control is a strategic weakness that only shows itself in a crisis. The UK's dependence on food imports has been growing for three decades. The crisis, whether a long disruption to global shipping, a harvest failure in a major supplier or a breakdown in a key trade relationship, hasn't happened yet. The question isn't whether it could, but whether Britain chooses to reduce its exposure before it does.
1.1 Why Comparative Advantage Isn't the Whole Argument
Mainstream economics says the UK should specialise in higher-value activities and import food from countries better suited to producing it. Global supply chains have delivered affordable food to British consumers, and reducing reliance on them could raise prices, hitting lower-income households hardest.
That argument isn't wrong, but it's incomplete. Comparative advantage assumes stable supply chains and predictable trade relationships, and the last decade has repeatedly tested both. It also leaves out costs that current import prices don't reflect: the carbon cost of air freight, labour conditions in supplier countries, the strain on water-scarce regions growing out-of-season vegetables for the UK, and the strategic vulnerability that import dependence creates. As carbon pricing spreads and those costs start to be counted, the calculation shifts towards domestic production.
The deeper problem is that comparative advantage is a snapshot applied to a system that changes. The UK's apparent disadvantage in horticulture isn't fixed by its soil and climate. It is the result of decades of under-investment in the technology, infrastructure and skills that would make UK growers competitive. The Netherlands, with arguably less favourable natural conditions, has built one of the world's largest agricultural export economies. The gap is policy and investment, not geography.
2. International Comparisons
2.1 The Netherlands
The Netherlands exported an estimated €137.5 billion of agricultural goods in 2025, from a country about a sixth the size of the UK. About €88 billion of that was produced in the Netherlands; the rest was re-exports of goods made elsewhere.5 It is often described as the world's second-largest agricultural exporter after the United States. That position rests on glasshouse technology, precision farming, cooperative marketing and sustained research investment at Wageningen University, widely ranked the world's leading agricultural university. The Netherlands shows what large-scale domestic horticulture looks like in a northern European climate, with no natural advantages the UK lacks.
2.2 Japan
Japan treats labour-saving automation in farming as a matter of industrial policy rather than leaving it to private enterprise, and has put robotics into use across a range of crops. The parallel with UK capability is direct, particularly Dogtooth Technologies, a UK company that develops and deploys autonomous strawberry-picking robots.6
2.3 Israel
Israel built world-leading drip irrigation and precision farming technology under severe water shortage, and now exports it worldwide. The lesson is that agricultural innovation under pressure produces intellectual property that can be sold abroad, which is directly relevant to the UK's post-Brexit industrial strategy and to the Economy pillar's case for productive investment.
2.4 What the Comparisons Show
None of these countries is so different from the UK in climate or geography that the comparison fails. Their results come from treating agriculture as a strategic investment rather than a legacy subsidy recipient. The UK has some of the best farmland in the temperate world, a strong agritech research base, and real strengths in robotics and precision engineering that carry over directly into farm technology. The gap is policy ambition and investment, not physical potential.
3. Steel Man: The Case for the Status Quo
The case for reform has to deal seriously with the arguments for leaving the current system alone. They are not trivial.
Comparative advantage and food prices. Economic theory is right that pushing domestic production in place of cheaper imports raises shop prices. Lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on food. Any reform that raises food prices in the name of strategic sovereignty moves money from the poorest households to agricultural landowners. That tension has to be acknowledged and dealt with, not assumed away.
Subsidy inefficiency. Farm subsidies have historically been economically inefficient, environmentally damaging (driving intensive farming at the expense of wildlife) and poorly targeted. The Basic Payment Scheme rewarded owning land rather than producing food or delivering environmental results. There is a real case for moving away from subsidies altogether rather than redesigning them.
Competing uses for land. UK farmland is also needed for housing, infrastructure, nature recovery and carbon storage. Expanding horticulture and restoring peatland both compete with those uses. No planning framework makes explicit choices between them, so the conflicts stay unresolved.
Farmers' own views. Farmers aren't all alike, and they aren't passive recipients of policy. Many have serious reservations about automation replacing their workforce and about the direction the Environmental Land Management schemes point in. Designing policy over their heads rather than with them has a poor track record. The farms deploying robots now are the enthusiastic early adopters, not the typical farmer.
UK food self-sufficiency has fallen from around three-quarters in the late 1980s to 62% in 2023. Fresh vegetables, at 53%, are at their lowest since records began; fresh fruit is the real outlier at 16%.12 The Netherlands, about a sixth the size of the UK and with no climatic advantage over it, exported an estimated €137.5bn of agricultural goods in 2025, about €88bn of them Dutch-produced.5
Comparative advantage theory assumes stable, predictable trade and doesn't count costs left out of import prices: the carbon cost of air freight, labour conditions abroad, water stress in exporting regions and the strategic risk of depending on supply chains outside the UK's control. This project's own connecting argument, which no single source makes on its own, is that the Netherlands' similar climate and much larger export economy show the UK's apparent disadvantage in growing food comes from decades of under-investment, not from a fixed geographic limit.
The causation above is consistent with other responses, both named in the Steel Man: accept comparative advantage as decisive and keep relying on imports, accepting the strategic exposure as the price of cheaper food now; or diversify trade relationships without the scale of domestic investment this pillar proposes. The Steel Man also raises a separate sequencing objection: not whether to invest, but whether robotics, peatland restoration and farm payment reform can all go ahead at once without overloading the people delivering them.
Choosing to invest in domestic production despite almost certainly higher food prices during the transition is a value judgement, and this pillar states it as one rather than claiming the evidence settles it. The judgement is that reducing exposure to an unlikely but very damaging supply shock is worth a measurable cost to household food budgets now, a cost that the Steel Man admits falls hardest on lower-income households. A reader who gives more weight to that certain near-term cost than to insurance against a disruption that "hasn't happened yet", in this pillar's own words, is not wrong on the evidence. They are weighing the same facts with a different tolerance for strategic risk.
Build domestic production capacity, through agricultural robotics at commercial scale, peatland restoration funded as infrastructure, an explicit self-sufficiency target with public monitoring, and an agritech skills pipeline, while softening the effect on food prices during the transition through a bigger Healthy Start scheme and school meal reform (see §5 below). The falsification test below sets out what would show the investment isn't closing the import-dependency gap it is meant to close.
4. The Reform Plan
4.1 A Note on Agrivoltaics
One idea that keeps coming up in discussions about the future of UK farming is agrivoltaics: raised solar panels over farmland, so the same field produces both electricity and crops. It is an interesting idea, and this project has spent real time on its economics. On the evidence available now, it isn't a foundation for a national food strategy. The payback assumptions rely on trial results that haven't been shown across large commercial portfolios, and the capital cost is far beyond most farm balance sheets without financing this pillar doesn't yet set out in detail. Rather than fold speculative modelling into this pillar's main argument, the full case and its open questions are set out in a separate working paper, where a lighter standard of evidence is appropriate for tracking a promising but unproven idea.
4.2 Agricultural Robotics
Labour is the main post-Brexit problem for UK farming, and autonomous machines arriving at commercial scale are starting to address it. Since the change in access to EU labour from 2021, crops have been left unpicked and farms have struggled to find seasonal harvest workers at an affordable cost. Robotics arrives not as a disruption to a working system but as an answer to a problem already under way.
| System | Status | UK context |
|---|---|---|
| Dogtooth strawberry picker | In commercial deployment, including at Dyson Farming; raised over £14m in July 2026 to expand in the UK and abroad; its fifth-generation robot picks more than seven berries a minute in trials7 | Developed and deployed in the UK |
| University of Essex prototype | £1.02m Defra Farming Innovation Programme grant; picks and packs a strawberry in about 2.5 seconds; aims at a unit cost of around £10,000, against about £150,000 for existing picking robots8 | Trialled at Wilkin & Sons in Tiptree |
| Polybee pollination drones | Innovate UK-funded trial with the UK Agri-Tech Centre and Angus Soft Fruits, testing whether drone airflow improves strawberry pollination in polytunnels9 | Could ease the pollination limits of covered growing if trials succeed |
| Electric tractors | Smaller models on sale; larger ones mostly still at prototype stage | Would cut diesel use and running costs |
| Autonomous monitoring rovers | Several providers selling commercially | Continuous crop health data for precision treatment |
Controlled growing environments, especially polytunnels and glasshouses, make robots more reliable than open, uneven fields, because fixed row spacing and stable conditions are exactly what robots need. Robots don't require any particular growing structure, but they scale fastest where one already exists.
4.3 Peatland Restoration at Scale
The UK has about 3 million hectares of peatland, roughly 12% of its land area, and about 80% of it has been damaged by drainage, intensive farming and other land use.10 Damaged peat releases carbon instead of storing it. Peatland emissions make up around 4% of total UK greenhouse gas emissions, and drained lowland peat, about 15% of the area, produces around half of them.11 The policy debate about peatland has been dominated by conservation and biodiversity. That undersells the case. Peatland restoration is carbon, flood and water-quality infrastructure, not a charitable gesture towards nature.
Restoring damaged peat mainly cuts those emissions; healthy peat then stores carbon slowly over the long term. Since peat emissions are about 4% of the UK total, this is not a marginal contribution. The other benefits add to the case. Healthy peat acts as a sponge across whole catchments, lowering peak river flows and flood risk downstream. It filters farm runoff, improving water quality in rivers and reservoirs. And restored upland landscapes bring mental health and recreational benefits backed by a substantial body of evidence.
The policy failure is in framing and funding. Land taken out of farming for peatland restoration needs compensation at real market rates, not below-market payments that farmers reasonably resist. The investment should be funded by a combination of voluntary carbon markets, where peatland carbon credits are increasingly credible; public investment treated like flood defence spending, using the same cost-benefit methods; and farm payments that value the full range of benefits restored peat provides.
5. Trade-offs to Acknowledge
The Generational Reset's commitment to setting out trade-offs openly means the following have to be addressed, not wished away.
Food price risk during the transition. Cutting import dependence before domestic supply has grown could raise shop prices. Lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on food and would bear that cost. Support during the transition and food access policy, including a bigger Healthy Start scheme and reform of school meals, must come alongside agricultural reform, not after it.
Competition for land. Horticulture, peatland restoration, housing and nature recovery all compete for the same land. The current planning system has no explicit way to choose between them. This is a significant gap in delivery, and no single pillar of this project resolves it.
Technology risk. At the scale national policy would need, agricultural robotics is still partly unproven, even though individual systems are already in commercial use. Investment should follow demonstrated performance rather than committing fully before the technology has proven itself at scale.
Costs for displaced workers. The people who lose seasonal farm work aren't the people who will take skilled agritech jobs. The change imposes real costs on particular communities, often rural ones with few other jobs, which need active regional employment support, retraining and clear communication about timescales.
Access to capital for farmers. Robotics, precision equipment and renewable generation cost more than most farms can fund without borrowing. Lending on agricultural terms, cooperative financing and partnerships with energy companies are needed to make access fair rather than limited to larger farms that already have capital. (The original Green Investment Bank was sold to Macquarie in 2017,12 so Proposal 1 would mean recreating that kind of lending, most plausibly through today's public investment bodies.) A programme that works for large landowners but stays out of reach for family farms would widen rural inequality rather than reduce it.
The cost of taking land out of farming for peat. Land taken out of production for peatland restoration has a real economic cost where farming is the main source of income. Compensation must be real, and affected communities must be involved in decisions from the start rather than presented with restoration as a done deal.
Inheritance tax exposure for family farms. The ageing of the farming workforce described above sits alongside a project-wide reform this pillar has to address. Economic Renewal's proposed 95% inheritance tax names Agricultural Property Relief for closure, with "universal application regardless of asset type" and no exemption for farmland. Applied to inherited farmland, that is a much larger liability than the current 40% regime. The government's own, far smaller reform shows how sensitive this is. The Autumn 2024 Budget planned to limit full relief to the first £1m of farm and business assets; after sustained farmer protests, including tractor convoys through Westminster, the limit was raised to £2.5m in December 2025, with the government estimating the number of affected farm estates falling from 375 to 185 a year.13 The 95% reform's general protections for illiquid assets, an equity stake in place of a forced cash payment and staged payment over 10 to 20 years (Economic Renewal §4.3), are meant to prevent forced farm sales. They are not an exemption from the tax itself. Whether that general mechanism is enough to stop the reform from making the succession problem worse is untested. This pillar flags it as an open question, not a settled reassurance.
6. Counter-Arguments
'This is just farm subsidy repackaged as national security strategy'
The proposals here are access to capital (public lending and cooperative financing) and infrastructure investment (peatland restoration funded as flood, water and carbon infrastructure, and an agritech skills pipeline). They are not direct income support for farm output, which is what "subsidy" usually means in this debate. The better comparison is energy security, not past farm payment schemes. Nobody calls investment in domestic renewable generation a subsidy for electricity companies, because reducing dependence on supply chains the country doesn't control is accepted as legitimate for energy. Treating the same logic as suspect when it is applied to food is the inconsistency worth pointing out.
'Comparative advantage says Britain should import cheap food and specialise in what it's good at. Self-sufficiency for its own sake is inefficient'
Comparative advantage is a sound argument when supply chains are stable and low-risk. It is much weaker once resilience has a price, as the Ukraine war showed for energy, when one geopolitical shock turned an efficient dependency into a strategic weakness overnight. This pillar doesn't argue for total self-sufficiency. It proposes a defined, monitored improvement from today's 62%, not autarky, and accepts that Britain should keep importing what it can't grow competitively. The argument is that growing only 16% of our own fresh fruit reflects decades of treating resilience as worthless, not a market outcome freely chosen with the risk properly priced.
'Restoring peatland takes land out of production just when this pillar says Britain needs to grow more food. The two flagship proposals work against each other'
The tension largely disappears once you look at which land is involved. Most UK peatland earmarked for restoration is damaged upland: carbon-emitting, low-yielding, and unsuited to the horticulture and arable crops behind the self-sufficiency gap. The exception is drained lowland peat, which is productive farmland and also the largest source of peat emissions; restoring it does involve a real trade-off and should be decided case by case with fair compensation. For the upland majority, restoration supports food production rather than competing with it, because healthy peat reduces flood risk and improves water quality in the catchments that lower, more productive farmland depends on. For that land the choice isn't food versus carbon. It is marginal land restored to protect the productive land downstream, versus marginal land left damaged and still producing little.
7. Political Framing
The opening argument that wins support across the spectrum: Britain grows only 16% of its fresh fruit and 62% of all its food, while owning some of the best farmland in the temperate world. A country that can't feed itself isn't strategically sovereign. It depends on supply chains it doesn't control, weather it can't predict and trade relationships it may not be able to keep.
The conservative case. The British countryside, with its chalk streams, ancient woodland and upland moors, is one of the most powerful emotional assets of conservative politics. Preserving and restoring that landscape through good stewardship is a conservative argument. Peatland restoration and precision farming are tools of stewardship, not impositions of environmental ideology. The family farm, long celebrated in conservative politics, is exactly what the capital access measures in this pillar are designed to protect.
The progressive case. Food security, rural jobs, affordable fresh food and a fair share of investment returns are arguments about distribution. The current farming system concentrates wealth in large landholdings, relies on seasonal labour that has often been poorly protected, and produces food poverty, rural deprivation and damaged landscapes, all things progressive politics should be tackling. The peatland compensation framework and cooperative financing in this pillar are designed to spread benefits across farms of all sizes rather than concentrate them.
The case across the spectrum. Looking at worst-case scenarios strengthens the argument on both sides. Investment in domestic food production and land restoration pays off across the full range of climate and trade outcomes, not only in scenarios that depend on accepting particular climate projections. Whether a reader cares most about sovereignty, rural jobs, the environment or the return on public money, the case holds. That robustness across scenarios and values is the pillar's most politically durable feature.
8. Key Data Points and Sources
The main figures in this pillar and where they come from. Each is also listed, with any corrections, in the Sources Register.
| Data point | Source |
|---|---|
| UK food self-sufficiency (62%, 2023); fresh fruit (16%) and fresh vegetables (53%) | Defra, United Kingdom Food Security Report 2024 |
| Age of farmers (36% of England's principal farmers 65 or over, 2026) | Defra, Agricultural workforce in England at 1 June 2026 |
| UK peatland area and condition (~3m ha, ~80% damaged); share of UK emissions (~4%) | IUCN UK Peatland Programme; Climate Change Committee |
| Dogtooth, University of Essex and Polybee robotics | Company and university announcements; trade press |
| Netherlands agricultural exports (€137.5bn, 2025) | Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and Wageningen Economic Research |
| Inheritance tax relief on farmland (£2.5m from April 2026) | HM Treasury announcement, December 2025 |
The agrivoltaics figures (land use efficiency, water use efficiency, capital costs and payback scenarios) are sourced separately in the working paper on that idea.
Cross-Pillar Dependencies
Agriculture connects to more pillars than almost any other area of this project, which is a strong argument for treating it as foundational.
| Pillar | Dependency direction | Specific link |
|---|---|---|
| Defence (S1_06) | Both ways | Food sovereignty is a defence issue. The fragility of post-Brexit food supply chains is the same kind of problem as the energy dependency the Ukraine war exposed. |
| NHS (S1_01) | Healthcare depends on Agriculture | The availability and price of fresh domestic produce affect diet and long-run NHS costs. Less air freight improves air quality. Restored peatland landscapes support rural mental health. |
| Education (S1_02) | Agriculture depends on Education | Modern farming increasingly needs robotics engineers, precision agronomists and software developers. Vocational education has to respond to that demand in advance, not after the fact. |
| Economy (S3_03, S3_04) | Both ways | Agriculture contributes to the trade balance, rural jobs and productive investment. The Economy pillar's investment framework and trade policy, especially a carbon border adjustment, are preconditions for agricultural reform to work. |
| Welfare (S1_03) | Both ways | Rural poverty, the decline of former farming communities, food bank use and access to fresh produce are welfare issues tied directly to the farming system. Support for workers through the labour transition is a welfare requirement, not only an agricultural one. |
| Immigration (S4_02) | Agriculture depends on Immigration | The seasonal agricultural worker visa and post-Brexit labour rules decide how fast robots must replace manual labour, and on what terms. |
| Economic Renewal (S3_04) | Agriculture depends on Economic Renewal | The 95% inheritance tax names Agricultural Property Relief for closure, which applies directly to inherited farmland. See §5 above for how this pillar expects that to interact with the ageing of the farming workforce. |
10. Proposals for Change
Establish Green Investment Bank-style agricultural lending on terms that medium and small farms can access, with cooperative financing so that farms below the capital threshold can take part.
Fund peatland restoration at scale through a combination of carbon market revenues, public infrastructure investment and farm payments that give real market compensation for land taken out of production.
Set an explicit food self-sufficiency target, with a public monitoring register and annual reporting, treating food security as a strategic national objective on a par with energy security targets.
Develop a national agritech skills pipeline through vocational education reform, apprenticeship standards and university agricultural engineering programmes, designed around the jobs that robotics-integrated farming creates.
For public discussion. Not affiliated with any political party. | generationalreset.org
The Generational Reset | S3_06: Agriculture | For public discussion. Not affiliated with any political party. | generationalreset.org