Farming and Food

The UK will change its approach to farming and food production. It will pursue 4 priorities:

Food security.
High calorie and nutrient dense natural food.
Low environmental impact.
Highest animal welfare.

Having left the EU UK farmers no longer get subsidies from the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Farming subsidies will be replaced with a system that focuses on the above factors.

Unlike now, it is highly likely that to score highest in all categories farms will be:

On average smaller than now.
Unlikely to be driven to consolidate into larger farms.
May feel driven to become smaller and more specialised.
Will stop raising animals (the highest animal welfare being a farm that does not kill animals).

The best farmers will be those who, as well as focusing on the above points, know that we cannot know everything and that we need to be constantly critical and open to change. The best farmers are those who rely on intuition and personal knowledge of their land, soil, the seasons and the climate and geology of where they live. You cannot tell someone with this knowledge what they should do to, but if they are following the above principles, they will receive state funding so that their good seasons and bad seasons are balanced out.

Over time this approach to farming would be supported by changes in education which encourages children to learn about food production and spend time working on farms, along side well supported apprenticeships for school leavers to pursue.

Food security and food independence cannot be achieved by filling land with sheep and cows. If 1 hectare of cows produces 1 million calories, and to feed them takes another hectare crowing crops that give them 2 million calories, its obvious that to meet the above conditions, the meat farming should be replaced with crop farming. Something more calorie dense that can be eaten by humans. Thats not to say that the beef farmer would be stopped, just that he would get more money by switching to something more effective in terms of food security and self sufficiency for the UK.

In addition to this, animal farms would be penalised for their effluence and methane emission, a further factor which would make switching to non-animal food production financially more beneficial.

Farmers may question the increase in diesel from having to plough fields used for crop growth. Some ploughing and use of vehicles which are currently fossil fuel driven would occur until the machinery becomes fully electric, but real world farming shows that it is possible to decrease or stop the use of pesticides and intensive ploughing methods whilst at the same time INCREASING food production.

Changes in school education would also allow time for children to spend time cooking and understanding about the local food produced in their area, along with the types of dishes they can cook with it from scratch.

All vegetables produced within the UK for sale in the UK would be subject to no taxation, making it the cheapest source of calories possible for everyone in the UK.

None of this is to say that the UK will be without meat. Meat can still be purchased from abroad, although anything farmed where rain forests have in the last 100 years been removed would be banned, and other meat would likely be subject to some form of taxation.

Published 1/7/2022

Utopia Manifesto