You can feel the tension in the UK food conversation almost everywhere you look. Prices keep rising, budgets keep tightening, and the quick options keep multiplying, even as we are told we have more choice than ever. The shelves are full, the supermarkets are lit up and stocked, and the system looks stable from the outside. I’ve come to realise that full shelves can hide a lot of problems.

If more and more of the food we can afford is also making us less healthy, costing the NHS billions and leaving us dependent on fragile supply chains, then perhaps our idea of food security starts to look more like a story we tell ourselves.

For this piece, I spoke with Dr , a public health nutrition expert and non-resident senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. He is also the author of Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. I wanted Stuart to be part of this series because he looks beyond the usual arguments. He isn’t interested in blaming individuals or pretending the market will fix itself.

Where power sits in the food system

When we talk about UK food security, we often start with supply shocks, trade or farming policy. But on the ground, it is also about what gets rewarded, what gets squeezed and who gets to shape what ends up being normal.

I think about a monthly farmers’ market we used to do on Elvetham Heath, opposite a big supermarket. One day a customer came to our stall and asked, plainly, why they would buy our sausages when they could buy “the same thing” for much less inside.

I never thought they were being rude. They were asking a perfectly sensible question in the food system we’ve created.

That is exactly the question Stuart keeps coming back to. What is the food system designed to deliver, and for whom?

“The global food system is still primarily organized and driven to maximise profit for shareholders. It’s a system that’s now causing more damage than it is producing benefit or value. The harms run across the board: rising obesity and type 2 diabetes, diet-related cancers and cardiovascular disease, and ecosystem degradation through deforestation, biodiversity loss and water & plastic pollution. Around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions are driven by how we produce, process, and consume food. Yet for the firms at the top, the system is working exactly as intended. It’s not a ‘broken’ food system for them, it’s ruthlessly efficient, efficient at turning cheap commodities into ultra-processed products and then into shareholder returns. And the problem is that the most profitable products are ultra-processed and the least healthy for both people and planet.”

On a farm, you learn quickly that what you measure is what you get. If the system measures success mainly in profit and volume, sometimes framed as yield, that’s exactly what the system will keep producing, even when the wider costs are ignored.

UPFs, affordability, and the structure of choice

It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. In fact, it was one of the most common conversations we’d have at farmers’ markets. On the surface, the sausages looked similar. But what people were really comparing were two very different food systems.

Our pigs were raised outdoors, free to root, forage and behave naturally. We used simple, natural ingredients, and when I added honey or wild garlic, it came from nearby. The supermarket sausages came from a completely different system, one designed to produce food as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

And still, the supermarket version looked like the sensible choice, because the system has trained people to see decent food as expensive rather than valuable.

Stuart argues that ultra-processed foods are not just popular by accident. They are profitable by design, and that design is backed by concentrated corporate power.

“There’s an inner circle of a handful of huge transnational corporations (Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Kraft Heinz et al) behind which sit the asset management giants: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, who own big chunks of these corporations and drive them to maximise profit at all costs. This is where the power lies, economic, financial, market, but also political power, as they are big enough to stop governments from regulating them via an array of tactics which I explore in my book.”

That was the hardest part of selling direct. We weren’t just asking people to pay more for a packet of sausages. We were asking them to value a completely different way of producing food, in a market that rarely rewards it.

What we miss when we picture food security

When people hear about UK food security, many picture a national question of whether we can keep enough food moving through the system to fill stomachs. Stuart is not arguing with that picture, he’s saying it is too small.

“Many would picture calorie sufficiency at a national level, having enough staple foods to fill stomachs. We need to communicate the value of dietary diversity, for health and for resilience. The need for local food economies rooted in culture, relationships and shorter diversified supply chains involving a range of actors. Food grown under conditions that protect biodiversity, soil and land health. We cannot have food security without radically reducing food inequity so that the UK population, all of us, have reliable access to affordable, healthy diets.”

Full shelves can exist alongside fragile diets and fragile household budgets. Security is not just about what is available. It is about who can reliably afford a healthy diet, and whether the way we produce food protects the conditions that make future harvests possible.

The media stories that keep us stuck

We spend a lot of time telling people to make better food choices, and not nearly enough time asking why the cheapest, most accessible choices are so often the least healthy. It’s a convenient way of framing the debate because responsibility stays with the shopper, not the food system shaping their decisions. I asked Stuart about media stories and myths that make the conversation harder than it needs to be:

“There are several and they’re linked. The myth that overweight/obesity represents individual failure, rather than being a structural/systemic problem in which, over decades, large transnationals have been permitted to flood our high streets with very cheap UPFs and junk food which are least healthy for people and planet. The erroneous notion that governments should leave markets alone, as if they’re free markets which can self-regulate (when they’re absolutely not free markets and self-regulation always fails). The mistake in thinking that regulating Big Food will dampen down economic growth, when in fact Big Food, over time, is a net drain on our economy via all the health and environmental consequences it generates. The assumption that government is not being co-opted by Big Food, when in fact they are being subjected to a barrage of counter-attacks when any sign of regulation emerges.

That’s the difference between treating the symptoms and tackling the cause. If the food system is the problem, asking individuals to try harder will only ever get us so far. Real change means creating a food environment where the healthier option is also the easier, more affordable one.

So what happens when governments finally try to step in?

According to Stuart, this is where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The ultra-processed food industry has a corporate playbook of tricks and tactics it uses to stop governments getting in their way. These are the ‘Deadly Ds’ he describes in his book:

• Dispute: undermine or sow doubt about the scientific evidence linking products to harm.

• Distort: shift the narrative to personal responsibility and ‘lifestyle choice’ to distract from what is being pumped into the food environment. Heavy lobbying sits here too.

• Distract: push high-profile corporate social responsibility initiatives with the left hand while the right hand keeps selling harmful products at scale.

• Disguise: speak through trade associations and front groups (there are 268 such bodies in the food world!) so the industry’s fingerprints are hidden.

• Derail/delay: use corporate litigation to actually governments. There was a big recent exposé on this by an international media coalition (highlighting 239 lawsuits in six countries over the last 15 years.) The corporations rarely win, but the main purpose is to buy time and delay any regulation.

• Dodge: shift profits and tax liabilities around the globe to minimise what they pay back into the public purse.

The point isn’t to get cynical, it’s to get better at reading what’s happening. If you can spot the pattern, you also start to notice what’s missing from the conversation, and whose interests are being protected when the debate gets steered off course.

One move government could make now

Whenever I ask people what the government should do, they usually want one simple answer. Stuart doesn’t think food systems change that way, but when I asked him what one step a UK government could take immediately, he came back to protecting children from predatory marketing.

“We have to take a whole of system view point. I am a little resistant to singling out one solution when we will get much bigger benefits by combining several. There are no magic bullets and change will take time. In the book, I describe four key policy levers – institutions, incentives, information, interests – that governments can deploy in regulating for people and planet. But if there was one thing that a government could do tomorrow it would be to clamp down across the board on aggressive predatory marketing of unhealthy products to young children. In all this, we need to remember we need to protect public and planetary health for those least able to do so themselves, and especially when they will be around the longest!”

Listening to Stuart, I kept coming back to one thought. We spend a lot of time talking about food security, but not nearly enough time talking about the kind of food system we’re actually securing.

The supermarket shelves still look full, which makes this conversation easy to dismiss.

But food systems rarely unravel all at once. They weaken gradually, one decision, one harvest and one policy at a time, until one day the cracks are impossible to ignore.

By then, we’re no longer talking about prevention. We’re talking about what we’ve already lost.

Links

Stuart’s Book - Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet

Food Fight Files

News, views and musings on food, nutrition and health politics and practice...written by a human

By Stuart Gillespie

My aim with this series is to make food security feel legible and human, not just a headline, so thank you for being here. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you especially, you’re the reason I can keep building it.

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Tip Jar

The supermarket shelves look surprisingly full, which is the odd thing when the headlines are full of shortages, wildfires and drought.

You read about salads struggling in the heat, crops burning, and livestock farmers feeding winter bales in July because the grass has stopped growing, and then you go to the shop and it is mostly fine. Not perfect, not cheap, not always the same, but full enough that you can tell yourself everything is probably alright.

I think that is one of the reasons we struggle to talk honestly about food security in the UK, because the system is built to hide the wobble, to keep the public calm, and to make disruption look like a minor inconvenience rather than a warning.

That is why I paid attention this week when the chief executives of Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Aldi and the Co-op warned the Prime Minister that wildfires and extreme weather are putting Britain’s food supplies at risk, and called for urgent action to reduce our dependence on imports. I am sceptical of supermarkets by default, because their normal behaviour is to quietly fill the gaps without anyone noticing, swapping one supplier for another, flying it in, trucking it further, and keeping the shelves looking calm.

So when they start calling on government to “protect UK food security”, I do not hear a sudden moral awakening, I hear fear, and I hear it in the context of a heatwave that is not politely contained to one region. If all of Europe is being hit at the same time, there are fewer easy substitutions, the usual tricks stop working, and the quiet patching over becomes harder to do without the public noticing.

To me, that is the point where you should be worried, because if the corporations who would normally do anything to protect their bottom line are publicly warning about food security, then we are already in a state of emergency, and the emergency is not only about whether the shelves look full today. It is about what happens when the shocks keep coming, when the buffer runs out, and when the cost of keeping the system looking normal is pushed down the chain on to farmers, workers and communities.

The missing bit in this conversation is what happens to the people who actually grow the food, because it is one thing for supermarkets to call on government to act, and another thing entirely for the farmers supplying those supermarkets to be paid properly after a season like this. A letter to Downing Street does not put money back into a farm account that has already absorbed the losses, and it does not change the day to day reality of being squeezed on price while the risks keep rising.

If we want to protect UK food security, we cannot only talk about “supply” as if it is a logistics problem, because food security is also about whether farmers can survive long enough to keep producing, whether local businesses can keep employing people, and whether the stewards of our countryside can afford to stay on the land.

The wildfires make it harder to look away, because a shortage is one thing when it is a number on a spreadsheet or a slightly different label on a cucumber, and it is another thing when you can picture a landscape burning.

A fellow Substack writer, , is a dairy farmer on the Isle of Wight, and her cattle graze as part of conservation work on the heathland. When the Headon Warren heathland fire broke out, it was close enough to feel personal, and she described it as “devastating” to see the impact on a habitat they have been working hard to protect, as well as a stark reminder of the danger wildfires pose “especially at this time of severe drought”. With no rain forecast, she said, “the next few weeks will be a critical time to work as a community to prevent any further fires”, and she also did what farmers do in the middle of a crisis, checking where the animals were and moving livestock in an adjacent field further away from the danger zone in case the fire spread. And Becca was ready to do the other thing farmers do in these moments, which is help. Farmers know their ground, and in so many wildfires this year we’ve seen them supporting firefighters by cutting firebreaks to slow the progress of the fire.

That is what resilience looks like on the ground, not a strategy document, but a decision made fast, with smoke in the air and the knowledge that you do not get to pause the season while you wait for help.

This week the Fresh Produce Journal reported that extreme heat across Europe and North Africa has squeezed cucumber supply into the UK, with Spain and Morocco seeing flowers abort in the heat, the Netherlands becoming the main market, and Dutch cucumbers reportedly selling at over £1 each. The Lea Valley Growers Association, which represents around three quarters of the UK cucumber crop, pointed out the uncomfortable bit, which is that Britain is only around 20% self sufficient in cucumbers.

That is the part I keep coming back to, because when we are not producing enough of our own food, the shelves stay full by pulling from somewhere else, and that is how modern food retail works. If one supplier struggles, supermarkets look elsewhere, and most of the time customers never notice, but this year that “somewhere else” is harder.

When heatwaves hit Spain, Morocco, the Netherlands, France, and large parts of Europe at the same time, there are fewer easy substitutions, and while the UK can and does import from further afield, and we already do all year round, the further food travels the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Delays, rising costs, transport problems and crop failures are not unusual on their own, but together they make the whole system more fragile, and they also squeeze UK farmers, because when retailers can source from further away they can keep pushing down on domestic prices even as costs and risks rise on farm.

The wildfires add another pressure, because heatwaves do not only make growing harder, they make the whole season more fragile, and plants under heat stress can be less productive, with flowers aborting, pollination failing, fruit setting poorly, and yields dropping as quality slips. A wildfire does not only destroy a crop, it takes months of work with it, along with fences, hedges, wildlife habitat and plans for the rest of the season, and then you still have to carry on farming the next day.

So British products can end up in shorter supply for two reasons at once, because growing conditions are worse and the losses are bigger, and that ripples through the system, because if UK supply is tighter retailers lean harder on imports, if imports are tighter because Europe is also heat hit prices rise, and if prices rise but farm gate prices do not, farmers carry the loss.

We are not only talking about a few empty shelves, we are talking about knock on effects that show up months later, when the weather has moved on and the headlines have too, because drought does not only mean less salad, it also means livestock eating winter feed in July.

Across parts of the UK, grass has stopped growing, fields that should be carrying stock through summer are brown and tight, and farmers are opening bales and feeding silage and hay that were meant to get animals through the cold months. The problem is what happens next, because winter feed is not something you can magic up at the last minute, it is built through the year, cut and stored when the weather allows, and topped up with bought in grain when needed, and when you start using it early you are not only spending money sooner, you are emptying the cupboard.

This is where the heatwave story turns into something more worrying than a short term shortage, because if drought has knocked back grass growth it has also hit crops, and heat stress can make plants unproductive through poor pollination, smaller yields and lower quality, with harvests that look fine from the road but do not fill the trailer. That leaves farmers trying to replace winter feed they have already used at the same time as grain stores are harder to refill because the crops that would normally restock them are underperforming.

Animals struggle in heat too, and heat stressed livestock eat less, grow less, and can be more vulnerable, which means farmers are managing shade, water and welfare while also trying to work out how they are going to afford the winter.

The shelves still look full for now, which is probably why this conversation feels so difficult to have, because food security rarely disappears overnight, it erodes quietly, one poor harvest, one drought, one farm at a time, and by the time everyone notices we are already trying to rebuild something we have spent years taking for granted.

A note if you are reading this as a non-farmer

If you have never had to think about winter feed, here is the simplest way I can put it. Imagine your household has a pantry that has to last you from November to March, and you spend the summer filling it, and then imagine you have to start eating from it in July because the supermarket shelves are empty and the garden has stopped producing. You can do that for a while, but you will feel it later.

What you can do, if you want to protect UK food security

This is the part that matters to me, because it is the bit that is within reach, and it is the bit that actually changes who holds the power.

If you can, buy from local farmers and local food businesses, not as a lifestyle choice, but as a form of resilience. Keep money in local hands, keep skills and jobs in local places, and make it possible for farmers to be paid properly instead of being squeezed by a system that treats them as a cost to be minimised.

Not everyone has a farm shop nearby, not everyone can afford to pay more, and I am not interested in turning this into a purity test, but if you have any room to shift even a small part of your food spend, it is worth doing. A veg box, a butcher who buys locally, a market stall, a CSA, a local dairy, a direct order from a farm, a community buying group, a local mill or bakery that pays a fair price for grain, all of these are ways of keeping the value of food closer to the people who do the work.

Because if we do not want to see the stewards of our countryside disappear, they need us now more than ever, and they need us in ways that go beyond sympathy. They need a food system that pays them, and a public that understands that “food security” is not an abstract national strategy, it is the daily survival of farms.

If you want to support this work

Everything I publish is free, and paid subscriptions keep it possible. If you have found this useful, you can subscribe, share it with someone who still thinks food security is just a talking point, or upgrade to paid to help fund the time it takes to keep doing this.

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If you’re interested in buying direct from British farmers, Produce and Provide is a directory of farmers and growers in the UK selling straight to the public, whether you’re a shopper looking for local food or a farmer wanting to reach more customers directly visit their website.

Produce & Provide

Links

Wildfires threaten Britain’s food security, supermarket bosses warn - The Telegraph

Farmer warns risk of UK drought may force him to stop growing vegetables - The Independent

Heatwaves cause UK cucumber shortage - Fresh Produce Journal

Heathland fire damage is 'heartbreaking' - BBC

Becca's Substack Note

'I woke up in the night to my field ablaze' - BBC

Farmer loses thousands after huge fire in fields - BBC

Farmers criticise government plan to counter threats to UK food security - The Guardian

Food price fears after Europe’s heatwave destroys estimated €2bn of crops - The Guardian

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

“If you look after the cows, they’ll look after you”, says dairy farmer .

This month we’re sharing a short video by the The Sustainable Food Trust about Sophie who is a prolific ambassador for dairy farming. Watch the film to hear Sophie explain why the best dairy farming starts with healthy, microbe-rich soils, well cared for cows and a commitment to working with nature.

At Home Farm, Sophie and her husband Tom, know every cow as individuals. They are bred to thrive outdoors on pasture - only coming indoors during harsh weather - managed in a way that prioritises welfare and produces a good quality milk.

As Sophie Gregory she posts a farm diary and animal health info to 35k followers https://www.instagram.com/farmer_in_training/

Video produced by the Sustainable Food Trust featuring Sophie Gregory.
Filmed by Jason Taylor, The Source Image (thesourceimage.com)

I’ve been carrying a lot of weight lately, and I’ve been trying to carry it quietly.

I don’t like writing about my emotions. I have that very typical farmer habit of just muddling through the difficult moments in life while trying to balance everything else at the same time. You keep going because the animals still need feeding, the bills still need paying, the kids still need you, and the world doesn’t stop just because you’re struggling.

But the truth is, being quiet doesn’t help. It doesn’t make the grief smaller, or the fear more manageable, or the pressure any less real. It just makes it lonelier.

The grief under the surface

And this week, of all things, it was Clarkson’s Farm that tipped me over the edge.

It wasn’t really about the show. It was about what it unlocked in me.

Not because I think it’s perfect, and not because I think it represents everyone, but because it dragged up the part of my story I try not to touch too often, the grief of giving up our farm, the grief of saying goodbye to our pigs, the grief of losing a life that was hard, and exhausting, and full of responsibility, but also full of purpose.

It also reminded me how many farmers are still struggling every single day, often with far less support than the public realises. It breaks my heart to see an industry full of passionate people being constantly attacked, undermined, or flattened into a stereotype, while the system around them stays broken.

Some days I feel helpless. Some days I feel like the work I’m trying to do is pointless.

But I also know that if we all let that perspective win, nothing will ever change. We just give in to what is ultimately handed to us.

Why “choice” is a myth when money is tight

I genuinely believe most households want a system that supports British farmers and makes us a more food secure nation. I do not believe people wake up and think, I’d love to buy food produced in a way that squeezes the life out of farmers and soils. I think people are doing what they can with what they’ve got.

That’s why something I read on LinkedIn yesterday hit me so hard, because it articulated what I’ve been trying to say for a long time.

“There is a critical flaw at the heart of the proposals for the National Food Service: the failure to recognise that money, not food, is the appropriate way to address food insecurity. We need a robust social security system that gives people the choice to enjoy a meal alone or with others, to cook from scratch or eat out.

But what of public diners? In public restaurants customers pay for their meals. They go there because they enjoy the food, not because they have no other options. Public diners are emphatically not a response to food insecurity.

We all have a right to food, and we all have a right to social security. Cash gives us choices, and choices give us dignity.

The appropriate response to food insecurity is income not food.”

I agree with this so much because it names the thing that gets missed in so many food debates. If households had the means to support small scale farmers and spend more money on food, I genuinely think many of them would.

And this is where I need to be really clear about something, because I’ve seen how easily people misread it.

I do not want a government that forces your choices.

If anything, I think that is what we already have, just in a quieter form. We don’t have a law that says you must buy from supermarkets, and you must support a global trade market over local food, but millions of people are forced into those choices every day because it is what they can afford. That isn’t freedom. It’s constraint dressed up as normal life.

What I’m scared of saying out loud

The second half of this is more personal, and I don’t love admitting it, but I think it matters.

As you know, I have a part time role with a UK farming non profit, Farms Not Factories. Like so many people on this platform, I’m also trying to make an income from my writing to support my family.

But with every month that slips away, I feel like I’m running out of time.

Time to make something of myself in agriculture and farming, in a way that doesn’t require me to abandon the work I care about most. Because ultimately, when push comes to shove, I will have to take any job I can to support my family.

I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because it’s the reality for a lot of people who care deeply about change. Passion doesn’t pay school fees. Belief doesn’t cover rent. And “just keep going” only works until it doesn’t.

This week alone I had so much planned, and then life happened. My step father is in hospital, and I’m trying to support my mother through that. My son has also been in hospital and unwell. And in the background, there is still the weight of my own unresolved farm situation, which never fully leaves you, even when you’re trying to build a new life.

I’ve been working on a book proposal, which has genuinely been a joy. I’m proud of what I’ve written. But I can’t even begin to explain the anti climax of waiting, hoping an editor will take it on, and knowing that so much of this is out of your hands once you’ve done the work.

On top of that, I’ve been trying to find another part time job in food and farming, and I haven’t been successful. So I consult where I can, I keep writing, I keep trying to grow paid subscribers, and I keep trying to hold it all together while being a full time mother and holding down a job.

This stress isn’t new to me. Before all this, I was a farmer, a mother, a wife, a part time worker, and about ten other roles at once. Farmers always are. You don’t just look after animals and hope that makes money, because often farming is actually the bottom of the list of things that make a farm viable.

It’s agri tourism, catering, educational visits, solar panels or wind turbines, industrial units, side work, whatever you can do to keep the whole thing afloat.

So when I talk about “muddling through”, I’m not romanticising it. I’m naming a survival strategy that becomes a habit.

The reality behind the shiny online version

I think there are a small group of us on Substack who are in a similar boat. We desperately want to offer more paid content and really grow our work, but we’re doing it while battling real life.

And across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and everywhere else, there’s this constant pressure to present the shiny version, the perfect workflow, the effortless income, the “I just posted consistently and it all worked out” story.

I have so much respect for people like because she tells it how it is, and she inspired me to be more honest about my aims.

So here are mine, plainly.

At the moment I’m earning some money from this work, but not enough for it to carry the weight it needs to carry for my family. I’m trying to get it to a place where it’s steady and reliable, not perfect, just reliable, over the coming months.

To get there, I’m doing a lot of work that doesn’t pay.

That isn’t a complaint. It’s just the facts of life when you’re building something, especially when what you’re building is not a lifestyle brand, but a voice for small farmers and a case for a local food economy.

Why I won’t stop backing small farmers

I’ve posted some content lately that hasn’t been received well, especially when I’ve asked open questions about what government could do to favour local food more strongly.

What worries me is that people think I want a government that forces your choices. I don’t. I want a system that makes better choices possible.

I also posted about Chris Packham’s rant on UK television about farmers, and I know that’s a taboo subject for some people. So again, let me be clear.

I do not support chemical dependency and monoculture.

But I understand why they exist, and why they will continue to exist, because the system rewards them. It is built around them. It makes them feel like the only viable option for too many people.

What I will always defend is that there is another story too.

There are small farmers practising organic farming, regenerative agriculture, agroecology, agroforestry, permaculture, nature friendly farming, and more. Those are the farmers I want to speak for. Those are the systems I want to make visible, because they are too often erased in the shouting match.

And I believe farming can change. I believe we can become more food secure.

The food security numbers that keep me awake

This is the bit where my personal grief meets the national picture.

Just this week, Defra’s own figures put the UK’s food production to supply ratio at about 60% by value, down from 65% the year before. That number is often described as “self sufficiency”, but it’s worth saying plainly that it’s measured by value rather than volume, which means global prices can make the ratio shift even when UK output is broadly stable.

Even so, it’s a warning light. Because the same Defra summary shows the value of food, feed and drink imports rising to £67.8bn, exports falling to £25.7bn, and the trade gap widening to £42.1bn. When the gap grows, we are more exposed to shocks we cannot control.

And those shocks are not theoretical. The analysis points to climate driven disruption pushing up the cost of key imports, including coffee, cereals and beef. Coffee imports alone rose in value by almost 20%, costing more than £1bn extra in 2025 compared with 2024, after droughts in Brazil and Vietnam drove global prices sharply higher. Cereal imports rose in value after the 2025 drought, which contributed to England’s second worst harvest on record.

This is the part that keeps me awake. Extreme weather is now hitting UK production and the cost of imported food at the same time. That is what food insecurity looks like in real life, not empty shelves overnight, but rising prices, tighter choices, and a system that becomes more brittle with every shock.

And then you read reporting like the Guardian piece this week, about MPs warning that ecosystem collapse overseas could trigger severe food shortages and price rises within five years, and you realise how much of our “normal” depends on other places staying stable, even as the climate crisis and biodiversity loss push them towards breaking point.

So yes, I care about the farmers trying to do it differently. But I also care about the bigger picture. A food secure UK is not just a patriotic slogan. It is land in production, skills, processing capacity, and a system designed to cope with shocks, not pretend they won’t happen.

What your messages have changed for me

I’m exhausted of trying to make everything work while also trying to get everything perfect.

But I also see the small changes, and they matter more than people realise.

A consumer who writes to me saying they made changes to their shopping choices because they read something I wrote. A platform for finding local farm produce telling me they’ve had more traffic because I recommended them. Messages like these:

“Thank you so much for your article. It absolutely hit the nail on the head.”

“Learning from you all the time. Thank you.”

“I work in a completely different sector, but it is striking how guidance can become in practice rules and hide accountability and sometimes be counter productive. Thanks for your point of view.”

“Find everything you write so informative Helen. I’m not involved in agriculture, but week by week you’re helping me become a better shopper, supporter and cook.”

Those comments are what make me believe there is a place for my work, for my book, and for more of us to support farming through content creation from around the world.

If I had endless money, I wouldn’t give up this work. I would do more of it. I have so much respect for my boss at Farms Not Factories because she self funds a lot of what we do. That kind of commitment is rare, and it is not something I take lightly.

It would be easier for me to switch this off and take a job doing social media and content creation for a business, or go full time influencer and sell shiny brands on Instagram or TikTok.

But that is not me. It will never be me.

I want better for my country, for our food systems, and for farmers everywhere.

If you want to support this work

If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you. If you’re new here, I’m glad you found your way in.

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Links

Climate impacts blamed as UK food self sufficiency drops to 60% - FarmingUK

UK has ‘no future’ if it fails to act on ecosystem collapse threatening national security - The Guardian

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

A new government roadmap always arrives wrapped in comfort words, the kind that sound like a hand on the shoulder. Long-term, joined-up, flexible, no one-size-fits-all, confidence to plan and invest.

Defra’s Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England’s Future is full of those words, and some of them matter. Farmers have been begging for certainty because the ground keeps shifting under them, with subsidy rules changed at short notice, new tax signals landing mid-planning cycle, and climate impacts that now rewrite the season year on year. You cannot run a business on permanent policy churn layered on top of volatile markets, volatile weather, and volatile input costs. The press release sells this as “certainty beyond the next harvest”, and as the most significant moment for English agriculture since the Second World War.

But the Roadmap’s real message is not the headline vision. It is the direction of travel on who carries the bill.

This is a plan for a managed transition away from broad public support, towards a system where more of what is currently paid for becomes a regulatory baseline, and where private finance and supply chains are expected to replace public money for routine “good practice”. That might be coherent on paper. The question is whether it is deliverable in the world farmers actually live in, and whether it strengthens UK food security and self-sufficiency, or quietly makes it harder.

If you want the longer version of the argument about why delivery and trust matter more than new boards and new language, my earlier piece Farming Is Not a Spreadsheet.

If you want more writing that follows the money and names who carries the risk, subscribe for free so you don’t miss the next post.

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What the Roadmap says, and what it avoids

Defra is explicit that this is not a prescriptive route map for every farm. It is a long-term framework that tries to hold together four outcomes, profitable, productive, sustainable, and resilient, while leaving different systems room to adapt.

That sounds sensible, but it also means the Roadmap is heavy on direction and light on the hard bits farmers measure in cashflow. Dates, payment levels, enforcement, and who is accountable for what, and by when. A framework cannot pay a bill, and it cannot enforce a contract.

A framework, not a delivery plan

The Roadmap positions government as strategic and interventionist in places, shaping markets, investing in skills, data, technology and infrastructure, and reforming regulation.

It also signals a clear intention to step back over time. Public payments are framed as time-limited for mitigation and transition actions. As practices become “standard”, support is expected to reduce, with regulation, supply chains, and private markets doing more of the work.

Government as “active partner”, then stepping back

Alongside the long-term framing, Defra’s press release lists a set of near-term measures it presents as the practical response to the Farming Profitability Review. These include:

• Extending fair dealing regulations to egg producers and fresh produce

• A task-and-finish group to unlock private investment in sustainable farming

• A UK–EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary agreement to cut export friction

• Opening the new SFI26 application window to all eligible farmers

• A £30 million Farmer Collaboration Fund to support groups of farmers to grow their businesses

• Moving the Groceries Code Adjudicator to Defra for a more “joined-up” approach

• Considering changes to the National Planning Policy Framework to support farm infrastructure

Some of these could help. The question is whether they change power and risk in the supply chain, or whether they mainly create new structures and new language while the fundamentals stay the same.

The immediate actions, and what they actually change

The Roadmap frames ELM schemes as the main tool for paying for public goods now, while also setting up a shift.

’s summary of the Roadmap, by Ffinlo Costain, describes three phases:

• 2026: a simpler, fairer SFI opening for small farms and those without existing agreements, then extending to all eligible farms

• 2027 to 2029: greater stability in scheme design, consolidated capital grants, and increasing spatial targeting, with a commitment for the ELM budget to reach £2 billion per year by 2029

• Beyond 2030: a refocus on “genuine public goods” markets cannot fund, with mitigation and conversion actions expected to phase out of public payment as they become embedded in regulation or supply chain requirements

The Roadmap is candid that by 2030, practices currently incentivised may need to become regulatory baselines, particularly around water quality, air pollution and emissions.

ELM as the bridge to a post 2030 settlement

The “profitable and productive” theme leans hard into innovation, technology, skills, planning reform, export opportunities, and a new Farming and Food Partnership Board to co-ordinate Sector Growth Plans, starting with horticulture and poultry.

It also flags a Sanitary and Phytosanitary agreement with the EU to reduce trade friction, and legal protections for egg and fresh produce growers against unfair supply chain practices.

All of that is plausible. None of it, on its own, fixes the core farm gate problem, which is that too many farmers are expected to be world class businesses inside a supply chain that still pushes risk downhill. Boards do not stop a last-minute spec change, a rejected load, or a late payment.

The real story under the Roadmap

This is where the Roadmap stops being a vision statement and becomes a bet: that private markets and supply chains will replace public support quickly enough, fairly enough, and at scale, as more “good practice” becomes baseline expectation. Nature markets, carbon markets, biodiversity net gain and catchment payments are presented as the post‑2030 settlement, but that shifts power towards contracts and standards, and towards whoever has the staff, capital and leverage to manage them.

’s Groundswell panel discussion captures the core worry: the Roadmap signals stability while also signalling withdrawal after 2030, and there is no evidence private finance will fill the gap at the pace implied. Add spatial targeting and you risk a postcode lottery. Add weak enforcement and you keep an extractive supply chain intact. Food security looks like a full shelf, but it starts with whether farms can survive long enough to adapt, and whether anyone is actually accountable when delivery slips.

The real test: who pays, and who has to deliver

One of the clearest reactions I saw came from farmer and author James Rebanks, responding to Defra and Natural England’s insistence that profitable farming and nature recovery “go hand in hand”.

He’s one farmer, not the whole sector. But he puts his finger on the same missing middle that comes through, in more polite language, in Farm Gate’s Groundswell panel discussion.

If you want more nature, you have to tip the scales. That means money from markets or government, or rules that force the market to pay, or both. If you are not prepared to do that, then “we want food and nature” is just a wish.

As Rebanks put it, “Unless you are prepared to pay enough one way or another to tip the scales to create more nature, then there is no way you’re getting that outcome.”

That is the question this Roadmap keeps circling without answering. It tells farmers to plan and invest, while also signalling that more of today’s paid actions will become tomorrow’s baseline obligations, and that private markets will fill the gap. The direction might be coherent. The funding and enforcement story is still missing.

Helen’s perspective, why this feels like a handover

I’ve put a “Helen’s perspective” section behind a paywall in the past, because I’m doing this on my own, and I needed a way to keep going.

I’m changing that now. I want this work to be free to read, and paid subscribers are supporting the reporting so I can keep it that way.

The Roadmap is building a future where farms are expected to be data-ready, inspection-ready, finance-ready and contract-ready. That future runs smoothly for large commercial farms and for corporate supply chains, because they already have the staff, capital and leverage to meet endless standards, absorb admin, and negotiate terms.

The risk is that small and medium family farms become the residual category. They either comply at their own cost, sell environmental outcomes to plug the gap, or quietly exit. Not because they are bad farmers, but because the system is being designed around audibility and invest-ability, and around buyer standards that can be changed at any time, rather than around fair margins at the farm gate.

That does not have to be the end point, but it will be unless Defra stops treating “fairness tools” as a talking point and starts using them like tools. Fair dealing rules have to bite. Tenancy reform has to unlock real security to invest. Advice and schemes have to work for people without an office team. And if paid actions are going to become regulatory baselines, then government has to publish clear, workable timelines and fund the transition properly.

Because without that, this Roadmap does not build a partnership. It builds a handover, shifting cost and responsibility from the state onto farmers, while corporate food keeps the leverage and takes the gains. It doesn’t build a farming future, it builds a corporate food future, and it asks small farms to carry the friction.

That matters for pieces like this, because the Farming Roadmap is not just a policy document. It is a statement about who carries risk in the next phase of English farming.

If government wants to phase out payments for “mitigation” and “conversion” as practices become standard, then it has to be honest about what replaces them. Regulation is not free. Private markets are not guaranteed. Supply chains do not become fair because a board exists.

If we want a profitable, productive, sustainable and resilient farming sector, we have to stop pretending that farmers can absorb every extra cost while supermarkets and processors keep their margins protected.

And we have to stop treating small-scale, tenant, and agroecological farms as optional extras. They are part of the resilience story, and they are often the first to fall when policy becomes complicated and markets stay extractive.

So here is my ask

Whoever you are in this system, the question is the same. What replaces the money, and who carries the risk while we find out.

If you are a farmer reading this, do not let anyone tell you the only choices are to scale up, intensify, or get out. But also do not accept a future where the state steps back, the market stays extractive, and the risk quietly transfers onto you.

If you work in policy, comms, or the NGO space, stop treating “private finance will fill the gap” as a magic sentence. Show your workings. What markets, what standards, what governance, what timeline, and who carries the risk if it does not materialise.

And if you are reading this as a shopper, a cook, or someone trying to keep the food bill under control, remember this. A Roadmap is not food security. Food security is whether farms can survive long enough to adapt, and whether the supply chain pays for the kind of farming we say we want.

If you have read the Roadmap itself, or you have seen organisations respond with specifics, please add links in the comments. I want to build a public trail of what is being promised, what is being funded, and what is being quietly shifted onto farmers.

Links and coverage

Defra Roadmap PDF: Defra Farming Roadmap 2050

Defra Farming Blog: The Farming Roadmap (24 June 2026)

Defra: Government response to Baroness Batters’ Independent Farming Profitability Review (PDF)

ffinlo's Substack

Your essential guide to Defra’s Farming Roadmap

The Farming Roadmap 2050 sets out the most comprehensive statement of English agricultural policy direction since the post-war era…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Farm Gate

ffinlo's Substack

Reflecting on the Roadmap: what next for food, farming and nature?

In an impromptu conversation recorded in the field at Groundswell 2026, sponsored by Adopt, ffinlo Costain gathered Martin Lines of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, Alice Groom of the RSPB, Vicki Hird of The Wildlife Trusts, and Joe Stanley of the GWCT Allerton Project to test their responses to the Defra Farming Roadmap against a week or two of ref…

Read more

a month ago · Farm Gate

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter, our monthly place to spotlight thoughtful work about food, farming, and the wider food system.

If you’ve ever tried to find a proper home for farming, gardening, or food system writing on Substack and realised there isn’t really a category for it, you’re in the right place. I took a break in June, which means this month’s community newsletter is bigger than ever, so please take your time with it and enjoy the work from so many wonderful writers.

I’m also really excited to say the AgStacker Roundtable is tomorrow on Zoom. I could not be more excited, because building community always feels like a leap of faith at the start. Thank you to everyone who joined last month, and to everyone who has been replying and showing interest since.

When: Sunday 12th July at 2pm UK time, which is 10am Eastern, 9am Central, 8am Mountain, and 7am Pacific.

I’ll also post a recording and recap on Substack next week, so if you can’t make it live, you won’t miss out.

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Take your time with the work shared here, and if you feel inspired, please join the conversation. This is your community as much as mine.

AgStacker of the Month:

This month’s AgStacker of the Month is , who writes Growing Is Half The Battle from Texas. Adam doesn’t just comment on broken systems, he has built inside them, from farming to urban agriculture projects, and he writes with the hard-earned clarity that comes from seeing where things actually fail up close.

What I keep coming back for is his focus on redesign over rhetoric. He is less interested in tidy “best practices” and more interested in real constraints, agency, and what it takes for good work to survive reality without burning people out. If you’re tired of pretending the status quo is inevitable, Adam’s newsletter is a smart place to start.

Here are a few pieces from Adam and other community voices that resonated with me this month:

A sharp, overdue pushback against the idea that acreage is the entry ticket to being taken seriously. Adam reframes the whole argument in a way that actually helps, because it asks what a farm does in a food system, not what it looks like on a brochure.

“If a small farm is producing food, serving customers, creating income, training growers, feeding families, building soil, educating students, strengthening a neighborhood, or keeping food dollars circulating locally, then it is doing real food-system work. I do not care if it is on 100 acres, 10 acres, half an acre, a rooftop, a school campus, a greenhouse, a warehouse, or a backyard.”

Growing Is Half The Battle

Stop Asking How Big The Farm Is

Last week I asked on LinkedIn whether you need 10+ acres to be a real farmer…

Read more

2 months ago · 22 likes · 7 comments · Adam Cohen

This is such a useful corrective for the local food conversation, because Adam stops treating “more farms” as the goal and starts naming the stuff that actually makes farms survivable. If you’ve ever watched great growers burn out after harvest, this will feel uncomfortably familiar.

“The farms weren’t struggling because they couldn’t produce food. They were struggling because they were being asked to solve every other problem in the food system by themselves. That realization changed how I think about agriculture. The bottleneck was rarely production. The bottleneck was everything surrounding production.”

Growing Is Half The Battle

We Don't Need More Farms.

Andrew Flachs recently wrote an article arguing that small farms produce value beyond yields. (You can read it HERE…

Read more

2 months ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Adam Cohen

This one goes deeper than “local food” as a lifestyle badge and asks what scale has erased, culturally and nutritionally, and what it would look like to rebuild a sovereignty loop on purpose. I love that it’s not abstract, it’s rooted in a real place, a real school, and a plan that can actually be repeated.

“Scale has a shadow: what can’t conform gets replaced. That’s why colonialism didn’t stop with a land grab. It rewrote the grocery list. Sweet potatoes? Too sacred. Millet? Too culturally rooted. Sorghum? Too resistant to empire-building. So the system pushed them out.”

Growing Is Half The Battle

The Food System Has a Shadow

Most people think wheat, corn, and rice dominate our food system because they’re “efficient.” But these crops weren’t chosen for nourishment. They were chosen because they scale, they store well, ship well, and behave reliably inside monoculture machinery and global trade…

Read more

6 months ago · 17 likes · 11 comments · Adam Cohen

From the Community:

A furious, brilliantly explained look at how supermarket “specials” are often paid for upstream, and what it means when suppliers are charged for the privilege of being on the shelf. If you care about farmer viability and real competition, read this.

“Six billion dollars a year, flowing backwards up the chain, from the people who make and grow the food to the two companies that sell it.”

Thank a Farmer

You Pay at the Checkout. They Pay at the Back Door.

Nothing in this photograph belongs where it is. Neither does $6 billion a year flowing from the people who grow food to the people who shelve it. The fruit paid for their places. The one lying down owns the carton…

Read more

a month ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · Fenton Hazelwood

A cheerful little reframe for anyone who has ever waged war on dandelions, part weed appreciation, part “maybe your lawn is the problem”. Practical too, with a reminder to harvest away from sprays and roads.

“I find dandelions quite inspiring, really. I mean- think about it. They potentially offer a solution to some of our biggest problems, casual supplements for a daily basis, a tasty food source, a pretty flower, and they are one of the first food sources of the year for bees, yet so many want them out of their lawns and lives.”

Red Jasper Farm & Sanctuary

The incredible benefits of the dandelion

Author: Arloa Chadwick…

Read more

2 months ago · 3 likes · Arloa C.

A provocative mini manifesto arguing that hybridisation is not a weird edge case but a powerful engine of evolution, and that our obsession with tidy species boundaries might be blinding us to what actually happens in nature.

“Perhaps species are mortal by design, and as such the discontinuation of species today is vital for the creation of new species tomorrow.”

Recombination Nation

On the Discontinuation of Species

This article distills my passion for the transformative power of hybridisation…

Read more

6 months ago · 23 likes · 12 comments · Shane

If you keep sheep, or you’re thinking about keeping sheep, this is the kind of practical, confidence-building guide you want bookmarked before breeding season arrives. It’s detailed without being intimidating, and it treats reproduction as something you can learn properly, not a mystery you’re meant to muddle through.

“The goal of this article is to help you develop, or further develop, a breeding program which, while challenging (because there is nothing worth having that isn’t), is also incredibly rewarding. Sheep reproduction is complex. Let this information be a spring board for you to deep dive into whatever you find interesting, confusing, or helpful.”

Leaning On Our Crooks

I Only Have Eyes For Ewe

The goal of this article is to help you develop, or further develop, a breeding program which, while challenging (because there is nothing worth having that isn’t), is also incredibly rewarding. Sheep reproduction is complex. Let this information be a spring board for you to deep dive into whatever you find interesting, confusing, or helpful. Join me in…

Read more

9 months ago · Ened McNett, DVM, CVA

A fascinating and infuriating look at why supermarket honey can be cheaper than it should be, and what “more honey sold than made” really means for beekeepers and buyers.

“The single most revealing fact about the global honey market is that the volume of honey traded internationally consistently exceeds the volume of honey the world’s bees produce. There is more honey sold than there is honey.”

Bee Spaced: The Global Beekeeping Digest

What Would You Pay For a Jar of Real Honey?

By Herman Van ReekumBee Spaced: The Global Beekeeping Digest is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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a month ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Herman Van Reekum

A powerful piece about what “development” erases when it only counts minerals and money, and ignores homeplaces, livelihoods, and the stories people use to survive. The menopause and seaweed cooperative section will stay with you.

“In my opinion, the meaning and significance of our seaweed harvesting cooperative cannot be reduced to monetary value alone. It should embody our midlife womanhood and emotions — things that only women can truly understand.”

Dialogues of Solidarities

Mining men-on-pause

This is Part 2: A Mining Corporation, Eastern Cape Villagers and the Mineral-Rich Coastal Sands. For reasons that will soon be obvious, as you read on, I entitled it Men-On-Pause…

Read more

a month ago · 1 like · Mpumelelo Sati

Farm physics, but make it funny and genuinely useful. If you have ever lost time to a kinked hose or a snarled extension cord, this will feel uncomfortably accurate.

“Tangle factor increases as length goes up and diameter goes down. This means you need to make a larger loop. Entanglement is a real danger.”

Cattle Culture

String Theory

String Theory…

Read more

a month ago · 12 likes · 17 comments · Cattle Culture

A quiet, sensory walk through a winter garden that somehow makes compost, fog, pumpkins and broccoli feel like a small kind of restoration. If you need a reminder that good soil changes everything, this is it.

“Isn’t that true of everything grown in healthy, thriving soil? It returns to its true taste.”

A darkly funny rant with a serious point underneath, about what happens when we breed animals for purpose, then pretend purpose does not matter. You will laugh, wince, and probably argue with him in your head, which is half the point.

“Have you ever seen a herding dog rounding up sheep? A retriever retrieving? A hound with a scent? These are the happiest animals you will ever see. There’s a light in their eyes that is unmistakeable to me.”

Fuck Farming

Animal Unemployment

The unemployment rate among animals is at an all time high, and it’s only getting worse…

Read more

2 months ago · 32 likes · 13 comments · Eric Suquet

A smart piece on why “regenerative” is becoming less a philosophy and more a market specification, and why the real fight is over who gets to define it, measure it, and capture the premium.

“The real distinction isn’t between regenerative farming and conventional farming. It’s between regenerative farming and regenerative marketing.”

Fencelines & Frontlines

When Regenerative Went Red

I’ve always been a little hesitant to call myself a regenerative farmer. Not because I disagree with the principles, but because labels rarely capture the complexity of commercial farming…

Read more

a month ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Fiona Aveyard

A lovely, grounded reflection on “progress”, and why choosing an agrarian life can be both practical and deeply satisfying, even when you are still juggling jobs, bills, and modern life.

“On the one hand it is practical - food sovereignty, resilience from a collapsing system, building future wealth (of skill and resources), building a life that allows our son to learn how to sustain life. On the other it is idealistic and romantic - for the joy of using my body under the sun as humans have since we first walked this earth, for the beauty and taste of home grown, chemical free food.”

The soil and the sky.

The richest peasants ever

Everything we are taught in modern, industrialised, western life is that we must progress upwards - away from the mindless toil and drudgery of life in the fields. The misery of what is sneeringly, or pitifully referred too as being a peasant…

Read more

a month ago · Tom McPartlan

A punchy rebuttal to the idea we should just accept industrial food as the best we can do, and a clear argument for real food, local producers, and keeping animals in the picture when we talk about resilience.

“Celebrating the reliability of industrial food misses the fact that reliable garbage is still garbage.”

Radical Farm: Animals, Food and Our Future

The Industrial Food System Has Failed Us

A version of this article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of Country Life in BC and the article below was published in the May, 2026 issue of Revive the Table…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Abey Rae Scaglione

Aquaculture is one of the most automated food systems on earth, which means cyber risk can turn into real world loss fast. This is a sharp, readable look at the digital blind spots behind the seafood on our plates.

“A sector that took on sophisticated connected technology quickly and built security around it slowly, or any at all.”

Kristin M King

Your Seafood Runs on Software

Seafood was a summer treat when I was a child. Cape Cod, the coast of Maine, a worn-out picnic table, and enough lobster to make you question your decisions about an hour later. Fried clams or scallops with extra tartar sauce, because there is no other way to do it. That is what I remember, and I remember all of it without any curiosity about how it arr…

Read more

2 months ago · 4 likes · Kristin Marie King

AgStackers is a community effort, and your voice is what will shape it.

Get involved

Reply to this post with your links, ideas, and anything you want me to see for next month’s AgStacker. If you’ve published something you’re proud of, or you’ve read a piece you think the community would love, drop it in the comments and I’ll pull from there when I’m curating the next newsletter.

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Until next month,

H x

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

That is how you end up with a country where people talk about “affordable food” as if it is a moral good, even when the people producing it are barely breaking even.

A reader, , put the same back to front feeling into words more clearly than I could.

“It’s all just so back to front. Trouble is too many people will still dismiss local, seasonal and British food because they’ve put it all in the category of ‘too expensive’. I’ve been prioritising food-as-medicine since 2007. Even when my husband and I had hardly any money, I’m talking pennies left at the end of the month, food was the number one thing we spent our money on. British, seasonal and as local as possible will top any faddy diet or trend. I was having a conversation just Thursday with a person who is ‘doing keto with just fish and eggs, because free range, farm reared meat is unaffordable’.”

I keep coming back to that because it captures the logic we have normalised. Cheap food is treated as sensible. Real food is treated as a luxury. The price on the shelf is treated as the whole truth, even when it is only one part of the bill.

This is also a follow up to my earlier post about British branding in supermarkets, The Store feels British, The supply chain is Global. I keep circling the same problem from different angles, because it shows up everywhere. The story we are sold at the shelf, the flags, the “supporting British farmers” banners, the bargain prices, often has very little to do with what is actually happening in the supply chain, or with who is carrying the risk and the cost.

The shelf price is not the full price

When people say “cheap food isn’t cheap”, it can sound like a slogan. What it really means is simpler, and more uncomfortable. The bill still gets paid, but it is often paid somewhere else, by someone else, later.

Sometimes it is paid by farmers, through prices that do not cover costs, contracts that shift risk down the chain, and specifications that can change at the last minute. Sometimes it is paid by workers in processing and logistics, through speed, low wages, and insecure work that keeps the system moving while staying invisible to the shopper.

Sometimes it is paid by the countryside, through soil loss, water pollution, biodiversity decline, and flood risk that communities live with long after the bargain has been forgotten.

Sometimes it is also paid by the public, through taxes and water bills, through health costs, and through the slow repair work that follows when a system is built to prioritise volume and cheapness over resilience.

One way I often put it is this. For every pound a UK consumer spends at the checkout, they spend another pound repairing damage caused by an industrial food system. You can argue about the exact ratio, but the direction of travel is hard to deny. The price on the shelf is not the price of the system.

And sometimes it is paid by households in ways we do not label as “food costs” at all, through diet related ill health, stress, and the constant mental load of trying to feed a family well inside a system designed to make the cheapest options the easiest options.

None of this is a moral lecture aimed at people who are stretched. It is an argument about how the system is designed, and about what we are quietly accepting when we treat low prices as the only definition of success.

How cheap gets made

A supermarket can sell you a chicken for a few pounds, or vegetables for pennies, because it has power. It has scale, it has leverage, and it can decide where the pressure lands.

If you are the farmer, you cannot usually pass your costs on. Feed, fertiliser, fuel, labour, packaging, compliance, insurance, interest, and the weather all move, but the price you are offered often does not move with them. If you are told the price is the price, you either accept it or you lose the contract, and the supermarket can replace you with another supplier, or another country, or another product line.

This is where the cost of living squeeze matters twice over. When energy and essentials rise, households have less room to move, and food becomes the adjustable line. At the same time, farms and processors are paying more for fuel, fertiliser, heating, cold storage, and transport, which pushes costs up inside the supply chain just as the public is being asked to accept that food should stay cheap.

That is why “too expensive” is not just a description, it is a category we have been trained into. It is the category that keeps the shelf price low by making anything that reflects real costs feel unreasonable.

The displaced cost, in three places you can actually see

First, the cost is displaced onto farmers and rural communities. When the price does not cover costs, farms do not simply tighten their belts forever. They cut corners where they can, they stop investing, they take on more debt, they burn out, or they leave.

When farms go, they do not reappear on demand, and with them skills disappear and local processing disappears. The quiet infrastructure that keeps food moving, butchers, hauliers, abattoirs, machinery rings, seasonal labour networks, starts to thin out.

This is also why small scale, organic, and regenerative food can look “expensive” in the supermarket comparison, even when it is barely making a profit. The higher price is not always a luxury margin. Often it is simply the real cost showing through, because the producer is trying to pay wages, build soil, meet welfare standards, and stay in business without pushing the bill onto someone else.

Second, the cost is displaced onto the countryside itself. A system that pays badly does not create the conditions for good land management. It creates the conditions for short term thinking, because you cannot plan for ten years when you are trying to survive the next season.

That is how you end up with soil treated as a medium to mine rather than a living asset to build, and with nature treated as an optional extra rather than the foundation of long term productivity.

Third, the cost is displaced onto households, but not always at the till. When budgets are tight, people are pushed towards the cheapest calories, the most convenient options, and the most aggressively marketed “solutions”. That is not a failure of willpower. It is what happens when the food environment is designed to make ultra processed food feel normal, and when time, energy, and cooking facilities are unevenly distributed across society.

This is where Renee’s example lands. Someone doing keto on fish and eggs because free range meat is “unaffordable” is not a punchline. It is a sign that we have lost the plot on what food costs, and what it is for.

We have made real, properly produced food feel like a luxury, while treating restrictive diet strategies as practical, even when they rely on supply chains that are often more fragile, and more expensive than people expect once they add it up.

This is not about shopping perfectly

I do not think the answer is to tell people to shop perfectly, or to pretend everyone can buy direct, or to turn food into a purity test. Most people cannot buy direct for everything. Many people are feeding children, managing health issues, juggling work, and doing their best.

This is not an ethics post. It is an essay about displaced cost, and about the lie we are asked to live inside when the shelf price is treated as the whole story.

The small ask is not that you change everything overnight. It is that you see what is happening, and that you make one small change within your means, because small changes multiplied across thousands of households are how local food economies stay alive.

It also means we stop letting “supporting British farmers” be something supermarkets claim in banners while pushing the real costs down the chain.

What helps, without asking for perfection

If you want to push back against displaced costs, there are a few things that genuinely help.

Buy British, seasonal, and local when you can, and treat seasonality as an honest signal rather than an inconvenience.

Buy direct sometimes, not for everything, but as a deliberate choice to put money into the part of the chain that actually produces the food.

Pay attention to labels and origin statements more than banners and mood marketing.

Ask better questions of big retailers, not just “is it British”, but what percentage of a category is British, how risk is shared when a crop fails, and what happens when suppliers speak up.

If you want a few questions you can actually use, here are four that cut through the mood marketing without turning you into a detective in the aisle.

What percentage of this category is British in season and out of season. What happens when weather wipes out a crop, and who carries the loss. Are suppliers on fixed contracts, or exposed to spot pricing and last minute changes. What happens to rejected loads, and who pays for the waste.

And if we are serious about UK food security, we should be able to say this out loud. Food security is not just full shelves today. It is land in production, skills, processing capacity, storage, and enough redundancy in the system that we are not one shock away from panic.

Food is essential. We already accept, in other parts of life, that governments intervene to keep essentials within reach. The question is whether we want a food system that keeps the shelf price down by making farmers disposable, or one that keeps food within reach by paying fairly for the work and building resilience into the chain.

A small ask

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Hello, friends!

As July begins, I want to take a moment to say thank you, truly, for being here. The last couple of months have been a little quieter from me, partly because of some big changes connected to the farm, and partly because I have been travelling for work. This space and the work I do would not exist without your support, and knowing you are along for the ride makes every step feel less daunting and a lot more meaningful.

I want this paid subscriber update to be more than just a list of what is coming up. I want it to feel like a conversation, and a place where you are not just funding my work, but shaping it and building something with me.

Coming Up In July:

• Cheap food is not cheap - Early this month I am publishing post that follows on from my recent supermarket branding piece, The store feels British, the supply chain is global. The core argument is simple, the shelf price is not the true cost of food. I want to make the hidden costs legible without turning it into a slogan, and connect it back to UK food security and what a fairer system would actually require.

• AgStacker community newsletter - I have had a month off the community newsletter, but I am really looking forward to getting back to it and sharing more fantastic stories from across food, farming, agriculture, growing, homesteading, and everything in between. The next AgStacker Community Newsletter will go out on the 11th of July. If you want to be included in this month’s edition, please send me a link to your post, or to something you have read and loved, and I will add it to my running list.

• AgStacker Roundtable - The day after the newsletter, on the 12th of July, I will be hosting our live AgStacker Roundtable for paid subscribers. The theme is still to be confirmed, but the purpose stays the same, a friendly, low pressure space to talk through what is happening in farming and food, share what you are seeing where you are, and help shape what this community becomes.

  Only paid subscribers will have access to the Roundtable. If you are thinking of joining, please let me know, and I will send out the Zoom invite in the week before. If you want a sense of the kind of conversation we have, here is a recap of the last Roundtable.

• Roundtable recap - A few days later I will post a full recap of the Roundtable, pulling out the key themes, the best reader comments, and any practical next steps we agree on.

• Later in the month I will publish a paywalled deep dive into the new Farming Roadmap. The free section will cover what it is, what it claims, and the headline changes readers should understand.

  The paid section will be my deeper analysis, what it risks missing, who benefits and who is exposed, what good implementation would look like for smaller and agroecological farms, and what to watch next. If you want to help shape this one, send me your questions, your worries, or the bits you are already hearing people misunderstand.

• Planning red tape and why it blocks real farming change - To close the month I will publish a second public anchor post on planning red tape, explicitly including and responding to the Landworkers’ Alliance article. The aim is to translate planning friction into a clear, non ranty systems explanation, and offer practical proposals for what would actually fix it.

As always, this space is yours too!

If you want your work included in AgStacker, send me a link.

If you want to come to the Roundtable and you are not sure what to say, come anyway! If there is something you want me to cover, reply and tell me. This monthly menu is meant to be shaped by you as much as by me.

Thank you for being here and for supporting independent agricultural writing. Your encouragement and engagement keep this community going.

With gratitude,

H x

I watched the Dartmoor pony row unfold the way so many countryside stories do now. A headline lands, people pick a side, and within hours we are no longer talking about land management at all. We are talking about villains and victims.

The version that travelled was simple. Natural England changed the rules. The ponies would be culled. The moor would be “saved” or “destroyed” depending on who you ask, and I fell for it too.

The Times headline that got me was “Dartmoor ponies could be put to death under biodiversity plans”, paired with the kind of figures that make your stomach drop. The reported figures were a 75% reduction in grazing animals, and claims that up to nine in ten ponies could be culled. Those numbers may or may not be where this ends up, but they were enough to set the story running.

That is exactly why I am not writing this to defend Natural England, or to join the pile-on. I am writing because the mechanism matters. When a living landscape gets turned into guidance, quotas, and compliance language, it becomes very easy for everyone involved to dodge responsibility for what happens next. If you care about Dartmoor, you have to care about how decisions get made, how incentives land on real people, and what gets quietly lost when grazing is treated as a problem rather than a tool.

How the story travelled

A big part of the heat came from how the story was framed.

’s Telegraph article’s are a good example of the wider narrative Dartmoor got folded into. In his piece that sits inside the wider anti-quango narrative, with “quangocracy” as the hook, Dartmoor sits alongside jumping spiders near Ebbsfleet, the HS2 bat tunnel, and the Hinkley “fish disco”. The effect is to make every conservation decision feel like either common sense or madness, and to push readers away from the messy middle, which is where most of the truth lives.

, writing on , does something different. She slows it down and asks what has actually changed, what is being counted, and what the downstream effects might be. Her central point is that the viral “pony cull” framing is not the policy. It is the interpretation. The real story is a change in how grazing is counted inside an optional funding scheme, the kind of scheme that looks voluntary on paper but becomes hard to ignore once money and compliance are tied to it. A technical shift like that can end up functioning as a decision once livelihoods and paperwork collide.

Because the question is not only “are the ponies safe”. The question is what happens when counting rules and guidance start doing the work of decision-making, and nobody wants to own the consequences.

Why I am wary of “guidance”

I cannot read the Dartmoor pony row without thinking about my own run-in with Natural England, not because pigs and ponies are the same, but because the pattern is familiar.

Back in 2020, when my partner and I were starting out, we took on a small woodland grazing tenancy on land that was considered part of Odiham Common. The grassland was an SSSI, and the woodland had not been managed for around twenty years. It was overgrown, full of invasive and non-native species, and it needed active management.

We bought twelve Saddleback weaners and did the hard, unglamorous work of making that site workable. We cut back growth to build a training pen. We planned rotational grazing with electric fencing. Access was via a narrow path around a pond and over a wooden bridge, which meant moving pigs in and out was never straightforward.

I still remember the day we eventually left, trying to move our year-old gilts out. One decided she was not crossing the bridge. She dived off the side. I dived after her to stop her getting wedged in a brambly ditch. I ended up in the lake with a pig, while my partner tried to wrangle the rest alone. At the time we were stressed out of our minds. Now we laugh about the day I fell off a bridge trying to save a pig.

The pigs were thriving. The woodland was changing. Regrowth was coming through in areas they had opened up. We pulled out rubbish that had been buried for years and that the pigs had brought to the surface. Even the wetland within the woodland opened up and extended.

Six months in, the landowner received a letter from Natural England. They wanted a site visit after being made aware pigs were grazing in the woodland. We welcomed the representative, showed them what we were doing, and walked them through the changes. In person, it felt positive. We were told we ticked the boxes. Natural England encouraged grazing as a management tool for SSSIs, but normally with sheep, cattle, or ponies.

Then came the letter. The pigs could continue, but with conditions that made the system effectively unworkable. We were told we could not bring in “non-native” bedding like straw, or “non-native” feed, including locally made pig feed. In plain English, that meant we could keep the pigs only if we stopped doing the basic things that make pig keeping viable. We were also told Natural England could help find a “better alternative” grazer than pigs.

We had bigger plans and knew we would outgrow that woodland anyway, so moving on was not the end of the world. What stuck with me was the logic. The outcomes on the ground were praised. The animal doing the work became the problem.

And the irony is that pigs have a long history on Odiham Common. They are not a modern novelty. They are part of the heritage of how these landscapes were used and managed, with pigs on the common mentioned in medieval records, including the Domesday Book.

Years later, I sat in a session at the Oxford Real Farming Conference and saw Natural England promoting pigs as a tool for SSSI management and biodiversity. So yes, I have a bias. It is not that Natural England is always wrong. It is that I have seen how quickly an institution can praise outcomes while still pushing decisions that make the practice impossible, especially when the animal or the method does not fit the default template.

Dartmoor is not just ponies

The Dartmoor story is often told as if it is ponies versus nature, and it is not.

It is ponies, cattle, sheep, people, and a whole set of commoners’ rights and responsibilities that have shaped these landscapes for generations. Dartmoor, Exmoor, the New Forest, and other commons are not museum pieces. They are living systems that have been managed through grazing, and through human communities that know the ground.

That does not mean every grazing level is automatically right, or that change is never needed. I am not arguing for unlimited grazing, and I am not pretending overgrazing is not real. It does mean that a huge reduction in grazing is not a small administrative change. It is a major intervention into heritage, livelihoods, and land management. When that kind of intervention is presented as “just guidance”, or “just counting animals differently”, it becomes very easy for everyone involved to dodge responsibility for what happens next.

Why this matters to farmers

The thing I keep wanting to say, especially to people who only see the ponies, is that this is not a single species story.

If you are a commoner, or you farm alongside common land, you are not just managing animals. You are managing relationships, rights, seasons, welfare, and a landscape that has been shaped by grazing for centuries. The ponies are part of that, but so are the cattle and sheep, and so are the people who have carried the knowledge of how to do it.

So when the public conversation turns into “save the ponies” versus “save nature”, it misses the bigger risk. If the system becomes administratively impossible, or financially unworkable, the outcome is not a neat win for wildlife. The outcome is that farmers and commoners step back, grazing systems shrink, and the practical management that has held these places together starts to fray.

That is why the heritage point matters twice over. It is not only the heritage of semi-wild ponies on the open moor. It is also the heritage of livestock grazing, commoning, and the human communities that have kept Dartmoor, Exmoor, and other commons as living landscapes rather than abandoned ones.

The question I keep coming back to

When we talk about “reducing grazing pressure”, what are we actually proposing.

Are we proposing better grazing, with clearer accountability, better monitoring, and practical support for the people doing the work. Or are we proposing a landscape that is effectively under-managed, because grazing has become politically and administratively too difficult to sustain. Those are not the same thing.

What I want to see, from everyone

If you want the public to trust decisions about commons, you have to show your workings. On Dartmoor terms, that means publishing the stocking assumptions, the welfare plan for any animals removed, and the support for the commoners expected to carry the change. It also means recognising that the countryside is not a spreadsheet, and that guidance built from numbers and desk-based advice can look tidy on paper while landing badly on the ground, especially when it is farmers and commoners who are expected to make it workable.

• Publish the assumptions behind stocking calculations, and how they were reached

• Be clear about what “success” looks like on that specific site, not in theory

• Be honest about who bears the cost of change, and what support exists

• Treat commoners as part of the management system, not a problem to be managed

• Stop hiding political trade-offs inside technical language

And if you are sharing the story online, ask one extra question before you pick a side. What is the mechanism, and who is accountable for the downstream impacts.

Because I have learned, the hard way, that it is possible to tick all the boxes and still be pushed out of the very work that everyone agrees needs doing.

The danger is not only that ponies disappear. The danger is that common land becomes harder and harder to manage at all, until the people who hold the knowledge and do the work step back, and the landscape is left to drift into conflict, scrub, and neglect. A huge reduction in grazing is not a neutral technical tweak. It is a strong intervention, and it should be argued for openly, with the numbers, the welfare plan, and the support on the table.

If this essay helped you see how quickly a living landscape can get flattened into a headline, and how the mechanism matters as much as the emotion, please consider subscribing.

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Free subscribers keep the conversation going, and they help this kind of writing reach people who care about Dartmoor, even if they have never had to manage it. Paid subscribers fund the time it takes to do this properly, to follow the claims back to the counting rules, the incentives, and the real world outcomes, and to keep making the case for a working countryside that does not treat commoners and small farmers as an inconvenience. If you are able to upgrade, thank you. It is one of the most direct ways you can support independent work that is trying to defend rural heritage and practical land management, without pretending a viral story is the same thing as a plan.

Links

Dartmoor ponies could be put to death under biodiversity plans - The Times

Natural England using pony cull to force us off Dartmoor, say farmers - The Telegraph

Culling ponies is the latest sign of Dartmoor’s destruction - The Telegraph

How Natural England paralysed Britain - The Telegraph

Danica Priest

We Need to Save the Ponies but it’s Not What You Think

This week, social media has exploded with fury over reports that 90% of all Dartmoor ponies will be killed to protect nature. News outlets jumped on the story faster than they could check if their lead photos were actually of Dartmoor ponies, and politicians on both sides vowed to ‘save the ponies’. When I first heard there was a potential pony cull, I …

Read more

2 months ago · 10 likes · 5 comments · Danica Priest

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

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The first thing that strikes you about supermarket branding is how confidently it speaks. It does not whisper. It does not hedge. It does not say, this is complicated, or this depends on the season, or this varies by product line, or this is a mix of British and imported because the UK cannot grow everything all year round. It says proudly, boldly, in fonts designed to feel like chalk on a farmyard sign, that you are in the right place, that you are buying the right thing, and that the people behind the business have already done the moral and practical thinking for you.

I want to show you what I mean, because this week a creator I follow on Instagram posted a carousel of images from inside an Aldi store that captures the problem in one glance. I am sharing it here not to pick a fight with one supermarket, but because it is a perfect example of how corporate food sells reassurance first, and leaves the detail to be discovered later, if you have the time and energy to go looking.

That is why the Aldi images land so strongly. They are not a gotcha, and they are not coming from people with endless time and money to shop “perfectly”. They are a simple record of what many shoppers see every day, which is a store wrapped in the language of British farming and British quality, while the shelves beneath that language tell a much more global story. The point is not that imports exist. The point is that the branding is designed to float above the detail, and to make you feel as though the detail does not matter, or has already been taken care of on your behalf.

When you look through the gallery, what you are really seeing is the gap between a mood and a measurable claim. “Championing Great British Quality” is not a label. “Proudly supporting British farmers” is not a breakdown. It is not even a promise you can test, because it is not attached to a product, a percentage, a season, a category, or a price. It is a warm, patriotic atmosphere, and it works because most people are exhausted. Most people are trying to feed their families, keep their budgets under control, and make decent choices in a noisy world, and they do not have the time to interrogate every aisle like an investigator. Corporate food knows this. It sells reassurance first, and it sells detail only when it has to.

The reason I am writing about this now is that I get asked the same question, in different forms, over and over again. People see the flags, the tractors, the announcements about backing British farmers, and they want to believe it, because it would be comforting if it were true. I also think most everyday shoppers are genuinely trying to make better choices within the parameters they have, and the cost of living is high, and not everyone has the luxury of paying for organic, small scale produce from farmers markets every week, even if they want to. That is another story, but it is part of why this branding works. They want to believe that the big supermarkets, with all their power and all their public messaging, are quietly holding up the farming economy behind the scenes, even if individual farmers complain, even if food prices are volatile, even if the news is full of stories about hardship. They want to believe that the slogans mean there is a plan.

The question behind the Union flags 🇬🇧

A reader called left a comment under a post I wrote this week about the speed at which British farming is being hollowed out, and her question was the most ordinary, reasonable thing in the world. She had seen a Morrisons advert in Farmers Weekly and wanted to know whether the big supermarkets help smaller farmers, or whether they are just trying to sell as cheaply as possible. It is also the kind of question supermarkets actively encourage, because their own websites are full of pages about how they are “supporting the people behind the produce”, with photos, farm names, and a tone that suggests the support is built in rather than conditional. That question can sound naive if you have spent years watching how supply chains work, but it is not naive at all. It is the question the whole system depends on you not asking too loudly, because once you ask it, you start noticing how often the answer is hidden in plain sight.

The uncomfortable truth is that supermarkets do sometimes support British farmers, in some categories, in some seasons, for some suppliers, and that is precisely why the marketing is so effective. If the claim were always false, it would be easier to dismiss. Aldi is a good example of how this works, because it will name farms and picture farmers on its website, and it invites you to picture a certain kind of British farming when you see those faces and those place names. The catch is that these are not usually the small scale farms people imagine when they hear the phrase, they are often industrial scale operations that can deliver high yields at a price point the supermarket model demands. The problem is that the support is not automatic, and it is not built into the business model as a first principle. The business model is built on volume, price competition, and the ability to offer shoppers a sense of abundance all year round, and when those priorities come into conflict with British farming, it is British farming that is expected to flex, absorb the risk, and take the hit.

If the support was real, the outcomes would look different

If you want to see why this matters, you do not need to start with animal welfare, or climate, or the most polarising arguments in the food system. You can start with dairy, because dairy is not a lifestyle niche. It is not a trend. It is a staple that relies on daily logistics, processing capacity, and long-term investment, and when it breaks, it breaks in a way that is hard to reverse. Britain has lost 160 dairy producers in just six months. That figure should stop you, not because it is a nice line for social media, but because once farms go, they do not simply reappear when we decide we care about food security again. Skills disappear. Local processing disappears. Herds get sold. Whole communities lose the quiet infrastructure that keeps food moving.

This is where the supermarket slogans start to look less like support and more like a kind of emotional outsourcing. The branding invites you to feel that you are doing your bit simply by shopping where you already shop, and it invites you to treat the survival of British farming as a matter of consumer identity, rather than a matter of power, contracts, risk, and price. It says, you can keep buying exactly as you always have, and still feel like you are backing British farmers, because the store is wrapped in British farming imagery, and because the word “support” is doing a lot of work without ever being pinned down.

When pledges become brand assets

Once you start seeing that, you notice the same pattern in fast food and in corporate welfare pledges, because the underlying incentive is the same. A pledge is a brand asset. It is a story you can tell. It is a way to signal values without changing the economics, and the moment changing the economics becomes unavoidable, the pledge becomes negotiable.

This is also why the Better Chicken Commitment matters as a case study, even if you do not want to spend your life arguing about chicken. It was a commitment made in public, in language designed to reassure consumers and signal higher welfare, but it is also specific enough to test whether a company is willing to change how it buys. It covers stocking density, enrichment, and a move away from the fastest growing breeds, which is the part that really challenges the economics of cheap chicken. When companies sign up, they get to tell a story about values. When they deliver, they have to change purchasing and pay for it. Those are not the same thing, and the pledge only survives for as long as it does not threaten the model.

This is also where it helps to be precise about what “first” means, because corporate storytelling loves a first. Marks and Spencer is widely described as the first UK retailer to sign the Better Chicken Commitment, back in 2018, and it also says that its fresh chicken meets the criteria. Waitrose is described as the first UK retailer to fully meet the Better Chicken Commitment across all own brand chicken categories from September 2025. That distinction matters because it separates a pledge from delivery, and it reminds us that the gap between the two is where the truth lives.

The harder part is what happens when the pledge meets the purchasing department, and when the cost of delivery becomes real. Compassion in World Farming has published a summary of high street food brands that have backtracked on chicken welfare commitments, naming major chains as examples. You do not have to treat that as a morality play to see what it reveals. It reveals that the promise is public, while the retreat is quieter, and that the consumer is left with the impression that the pledge still means something, because the brand has already banked the trust.

If you have ever wondered why people feel so confused and cynical about food, this is part of the answer. It is not that consumers are stupid. It is that the system is designed to make trust feel effortless, while making verification feel like work. It is designed to make you feel that you are supporting British farmers because the store says you are, while the reality of sourcing, pricing, and farm viability sits elsewhere, in contracts you will never see, in margins you cannot measure, and in outcomes you only notice when the damage is already done.

That is why I do not think the right response is to tell people to shop perfectly, or to turn food into a purity test. Most people cannot buy direct for everything. Many people are stretched. Many people are feeding children, managing health issues, juggling work, and doing their best. The point is not to shame shoppers for living in the world we have. The point is to stop letting corporate food companies use British farming as a trust signal while treating British farmers as interchangeable suppliers in a global sourcing machine.

If a supermarket wants to tell you it is supporting British farmers, then it should be able to show you what that means in practice, in ways that go beyond the photogenic parts of the store. It should be able to tell you how much of each category is British, including processed and ready meals, not just the fresh meat and the seasonal produce. It should be able to tell you how farmers are paid, how risk is shared when weather wipes out a crop, and what happens when a supplier speaks up. If a company signs a welfare commitment, it should be able to tell you whether it delivered it, and if not, what changed, because the difference between a pledge and delivery is not a technicality. It is the whole point.

What it looks like to support British farming, for real

So what does actually support British farmers, in the real world, rather than in a slogan. It looks like buying direct when you can, because direct sales are one of the few places where the farmer has a fighting chance of setting a price that reflects costs. It looks like buying local when it is available, and treating seasonality as an honest signal rather than an inconvenience, because a food system that pretends everything is available all the time is a food system that will always lean on imports and cheapness to keep the shelves full. It looks like paying attention to origin labels rather than banners, and noticing when the mood of the store is doing more work than the facts on the packaging.

It also looks like insisting that this is not only a shopping question. It is a policy and power question. If we want British farming to survive, and if we want animal welfare and countryside outcomes that match the values we claim to hold, then we need a food economy that can pay for those things, and we need rules that stop the biggest buyers from shifting all the risk down the chain while borrowing the language of British farming to keep shoppers loyal.

Jillian’s question deserves a better answer than a shrug, because it is the question at the heart of food security, and it is the question that will keep coming back as more farms disappear. Supermarkets and fast food chains are very good at telling stories about who they are. The harder work is asking what those stories cost, who pays the bill, and what happens when the slogans meet the reality on the shelf.

If we do not insist on that distinction, we will keep being sold the story of British farming while the people doing the work are hung out to dry, and we will keep being told that the answer is to shop harder, rather than to demand a system that stops treating trust as a marketing tool and starts treating it as something you have to earn.

If this essay helped you see the gap between the story we are sold and the reality on the shelf a little more clearly, please consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

Free subscribers keep the conversation going, and they help this kind of writing travel beyond the farming bubble, which matters when corporate food branding is shaping what the public thinks is normal. Paid subscribers fund the time it takes to do this properly, to follow the claims back to the sourcing, the incentives, and the outcomes, and to keep making the case for a British food system that does not treat farmers as disposable. If you are able to upgrade, thank you. It is one of the most direct ways you can support independent work that is trying to support British farming, without pretending a Union flag in an aisle is the same thing as a fair deal.

Links and coverage

British quality - Aldi

Supporting the people behind the produce - Morrisons

Britain loses 160 dairy producers in just six months - Farming UK

Better Chicken Commitment UK

High-street food brands backtrack on chicken welfare - Compassion in World Farming

Londoners baffled as giant 'frankenchicken' appears at Pret in central London - Yahoo News

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

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Shane Holland grew up on the clifftops of Cornwall in a food and farming community, then went to London as a student to study medicine. In London, he noticed what he’d lost, the quality and taste of real local food.

Reflecting on the quality and taste of the food he had left behind in Cornwall, compared to what he was eating in London, he decided to abandon medicine and devote his life to improving the way we think of food, to value local, seasonal vegetables, grains, fruits, meat and seafood from local producers. Shane’s wish to connect people with artisan farmers and producers led him to the Slow Food movement which was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986 in the aftermath of a campaign against the opening of a McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome, and it has since spread worldwide. Its message is simple, food should be hugely valued, grown by farmers who are closely connected with their land, soils and animals, and prepared with care and respect for the local food heritage.

He is now the Executive Chairman of and Chairman of Borough Market where many of the stallholders trade under the Slow Food Snail emblem which guarantees ethical, agro-ecological and high animal welfare food produced by small-scale, artisan farmers.

“So often we think of food as being about calories or macronutrients. They’re important, but there’s so much more to be gained from sharing food around the table, sharing food with someone that we love and thinking about where our food comes from. What we really need to do is to get back to actually supporting our farmers, and we do that by eating genuinely local, genuinely seasonal food. If we do that, it’s going to be better for our health, it’s going to be better for the planet.”

On 22 May Slow Food announced that Carlo Petrini had passed away at his home in Bra, Piedmont, Northern Italy, the ancient market town surrounded by small farms, terraces and wooded hillsides where he was born and from where he inspired the Slow Food Movement into a worldwide campaign for locally produced, healthy and traditionally prepared food.

Watch and share the film. Join the Slow Food movement - Seek out local, seasonal food from farm shops, farmers’ markets or online hubs. Choose a connection with your food while keeping money in local communities.

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The UK meat debate keeps trying to force a choice that does not match real life. Either you drop meat entirely, or you carry on as we are. That binary might be emotionally satisfying, but it is not a serious plan for a country that says it wants to be more food secure, more self-sufficient, and more honest about welfare.

I am writing this because I have watched the meat debate get shaped by marketing, not just evidence. Because I am outspoken against factory farming, I naturally get a lot of vegan activism in my feeds. Some of it is thoughtful and some of it is designed to win a moral argument, and the line between the two is not always obvious when you are scrolling. What I keep seeing, again and again, is animal agriculture treated as the villain, when the real project is industrial systems and the way they concentrate animals, manure, and risk. Not all farming systems are equal, and pretending they are is how we end up with heat and no plan.

I do not think there is anything wrong with eating meat. Meat can be a genuinely valuable food, and I am not interested in sneering at people who prioritise it, especially the ones spending real money with a local butcher and keeping British supply chains alive.

But I also do not think we can keep eating meat at the rate we currently do and tell ourselves we are choosing the high welfare option, or the self-sufficient option, or the option that stops us outsourcing welfare and pollution. If we want a UK food system that is more resilient, and more honest about land use, then the conclusion is uncomfortable but simple.

We need better systems and fewer animals going through them.

How the debate gets stuck

A lot of campaigning energy in the UK is currently aimed at one message, that the only ethical endpoint is meat free. Sometimes that message is wrapped in climate language, sometimes in health language, sometimes in animal welfare language, and sometimes in a mix of all three. George Monbiot is one of the most influential voices in this space, and he is often right to challenge complacency and to demand that we stop treating the status quo as inevitable.

Here is what tends to happen next. If the starting point is that meat is always wrong, the conversation stops being about how food is produced and turns into a test of who is a good person. People get pushed to pick a side, and then everything else gets drowned out. That is how you end up with a public debate where the only two options anyone hears are stop eating meat completely, or ignore the problems and carry on.

That false choice suits the people who profit from cheap meat. It makes the middle position sound like weakness, when it is actually the only option that can be built in the real world.

Two different arguments

Most everyday people are not trying to be cruel. They are trying to make decent choices in a noisy world, and they are reacting to real harms. They are reacting to the scale of suffering in intensive systems. They are reacting to pollution, to antibiotic resistance, to the feeling that something is out of balance. They are reacting to the fact that climate and nature targets are being missed, while the food system keeps asking everyone to carry on.

The problem is that the argument often collapses two different claims into one.

Meat is not the same thing as factory farming.

When people say meat is bad, they often mean factory farming is bad. When they say animal agriculture is the villain, they often mean industrial systems are the villain. Those are not the same statements, and treating them as the same is how we keep the worst systems in place. It pushes consumers into guilt or defiance, and it lets the companies who profit from high volume, low margin meat carry on in the background.

If you want a quick test for the next viral post you see, ask three questions. Are they talking about species or system. Are they talking about volume or standards. Are they talking about the UK or global averages. If the answer is species, volume, and global, then you are usually looking at a message designed to win an argument, not a plan designed to change what happens on British land. You can see that ‘I don’t buy it’ framing in real UK campaigning too, including Project Slingshot’s adverts below.

The middle ground

There is nothing wrong with eating meat. Factory farming is wrong, and it should be phased out and banned. High welfare is not a nice extra, it is the minimum standard we should be aiming for. Organic and agroecology matter for nature, biodiversity, and pollution. Food security and self-sufficiency matter for the UK, and we should not rely on imports to square the circle.

If you hold all of those things at once, you run into a constraint that no amount of online certainty can magic away.

The UK cannot supply current levels of meat consumption through high welfare, lower impact systems without either importing more, intensifying more, or eating less.

You can’t have all three

This is the triangle we keep skating around. High welfare. Self-sufficiency. Current volume. You can make progress on two, but you cannot have all three at once without trade offs.

High welfare costs money and labour. Self-sufficiency costs planning and infrastructure. Current volume costs either imports, intensification, or lower welfare. That is not a moral argument. It is a land and infrastructure argument.

This is why this is not just a personal diet choice, it is a national volume question.

The reality of land use

A lot of the loudest arguments about meat talk as if the UK is a blank sheet of paper. It is not.

Defra (Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) estimates the UK had 17.0 million hectares of utilised agricultural area in 2023, around 70% of UK land. Within that, 57% of utilised agricultural area is permanent grassland. The croppable area is just over 6.0 million hectares, around 36% of utilised agricultural area.

Defra also estimates that 85% of utilised agricultural area is used for animal feed or animal production, with assumptions. That is not a slogan. It is a broad indicator, and it is part of why this debate keeps collapsing into extremes. If you want to change what we eat and how we produce it, you have to deal with what our land can actually do, and what it cannot.

Beef and lamb are not the same land use story as pork and chicken. Ruminants can convert grass into food. Pigs and poultry rely far more on feed crops and supply chains. If you want a UK meat debate that is honest, you have to separate systems and scale, and you have to separate high welfare from legal minimum.

What the figures suggest

This is not just philosophical. It shows up in the UK’s own reporting.

Defra’s UK Food Security Report 2024 uses production-to-supply ratios as broad indicators. It puts the UK production-to-supply ratio at 62% for all food in 2023, and 75% for indigenous foods that can be produced here.

Within that, Defra reports the UK pig meat production-to-supply ratio fell from 71% in 2021 to 64% in 2023. For poultry meat, Defra shows the production-to-supply ratio dropped from 93% in 2021 to 82% in 2023.

Defra also cautions that some meat trade is not captured, including meat-based ready meals, and that these ratios are broad indicators rather than a perfect measure. The point is not to treat them as a scoreboard. The point is to stop pretending that the UK can keep eating the same volumes while also claiming we are doing high welfare, high standards, and self-sufficiency.

Where the power sits

This is where the workable middle becomes practical. Welfare is not free. Higher welfare generally means more space, more time, more labour, and more cost. If we mean it, we have to build a food economy that can pay for it, and we have to rebuild the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Defra reports that 21% of smaller abattoirs in England closed between 2018 and 2022. It also notes that four processors account for around 90% of UK poultry production. If you want to raise welfare and reduce pollution, you cannot ignore the reality that standards are shaped by concentrated infrastructure.

Factory farming isn’t the same as meat

This is where I think it is important to be precise. Compassion in World Farming is not the same as George Monbiot, and opposition to factory farming is not the same thing as opposition to meat itself.

I can agree with Compassion in World Farming on the core point that factory farming is a welfare and pollution problem, without pretending that the only ethical endpoint is a meat free country. If you want to reduce harm quickly, you target the systems that concentrate animals, concentrate manure, and concentrate risk. If you want to win a moral argument, you target meat as a category. Those are not the same project, and confusing them is one reason the UK keeps failing to build the workable middle.

You can see how easily that gets blurred in public messaging, including the Animal Justice Project’s London Underground adverts below.

What would actually help

A serious UK approach to meat would start with a clear national aim. We want to be more food secure. We want to be more self-sufficient. We want higher welfare. We want less pollution. We want farming that protects nature and biodiversity.

Then it would act like those aims matter. It would phase out and ban new factory farms. It would reward systems that reduce pollution and improve animal welfare, and it would enforce the rules we already have. It would invest in the boring infrastructure that makes better farming possible, processing, local abattoirs, fair contracts, and planning that does not punish small scale infrastructure.

And it would stop pretending that we can have high welfare, high volume, low price, and high self-sufficiency all at once.

A simple way to choose, without turning it into a purity test

If you are an everyday consumer, you are not going to fix the food system alone. But you can make choices that reward better farming, and you can stop letting the loudest voices push you into a false choice.

If you eat meat, choose better quality and locally sourced where you can. Support the farmers and supply chains that are trying to do it properly. Be honest that higher welfare costs more, and that paying more per kilo is part of the point.

If choosing better meat means you eat less of it, that is not a failure. It is how you make space for a UK food system that is more secure, more self-sufficient, and more aligned with the standards we say we care about.

And if you want this to be easier, not harder, then aim your frustration upwards as well as inwards. Ask where your meat comes from. Ask what standards it was produced to. Ask what happens to the farmer’s margin, and who holds the power in the supply chain. Support policies that keep local abattoirs open, enforce welfare rules, and stop the expansion of factory farming.

So what do I want you to do with this

I am not asking you to feel guilty for eating meat. I am asking you to stop accepting a false choice.

Here is the farmer part that rarely gets said out loud. When the public conversation stays stuck between “meat is murder” and “leave us alone”, the people who get squeezed are not the loudest voices on either side. It is the farmers trying to do it properly. They are the ones carrying higher costs, more paperwork, and more risk, while the market keeps rewarding volume and the supply chain keeps concentrating power. If we want fewer factory farms and higher welfare meat, we have to stop treating that as a lifestyle preference and start treating it as a national choice that needs infrastructure, enforcement, and fair pricing behind it.

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Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter, a monthly place to spotlight writers sharing thoughtful work about food, farming, and the wider food system.

If you’ve ever tried to find a proper home for farming, gardening, or food system writing on Substack and realised there isn’t really a category for it, you’re in the right place. Whether you write, read, or simply care about how food is grown, you’re invited to join in and help shape what we’re building.

A quick note from me before we get into this month’s links. This newsletter is a little later than usual. I have been in the middle of a fairly intense stretch of life and work, with some big personal loose ends to tie up and a larger project taking up more of my energy than I expected, all while keeping on top of my Farms Not Factories role. The result is that my own Substack rhythm has slipped a bit lately, and I appreciate your patience.

Because of that, I’ve decided to postpone the AgStacker Roundtable until June, so I can get my feet back under me before we dive into the conversation again.

Even when everything else feels slightly chaotic, this community newsletter is one of my favourite posts to write. I love getting to share other people’s work, and I’m grateful to everyone who keeps replying, recommending pieces, and helping make AgStackers feel like a real place.

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Take your time with the work shared here, and if you feel inspired, please join the conversation. This is your community as much as mine.

AgStacker of the Month:

This month’s AgStacker of the Month is , who writes & from Wiltshire. Jackie writes about smallholding and working the land, but what I value most is her clarity. She cuts through the fog when farming conversations get crowded with vague claims, fashionable panic, or easy certainty.

She is practical without being cold about it, and honest without turning that into performance. I found Jackie’s writing when I first joined Substack, and it genuinely shaped how I write and what I pay attention to. She has also been a huge support of AgStacker and of my work, and I do not take that lightly. If you have not read Smallholder Journal yet, this is your nudge.

Here are a few pieces from Jackie and other community voices that resonated with me this month:

Jackie at her absolute best, smallholding detail and dry humour, then the gut punch when “help” arrives in the form of a machine that does not understand what it is driving over. It’s also about what it feels like to spend decades building something careful and living, only to watch it get flattened by someone else’s idea of efficiency.

“At this point, it became apparent that there was a complete lack of understanding, the further up the communication chain you travelled, about our ethos, and the work we have done for the last quarter century. My carefully protected sward has been vandalised. It will be damaged for decades.”

Smallholder Journal

Despair and Dreams

Read more

5 months ago · 13 likes · 7 comments · Jackie Bridgen

And this one does two things we need right now, it names the reality of trying to grow and rear food in weather that feels increasingly unhinged, and it calls out the online hot takes that dismiss self reliance as a “scam” while quietly trying to sell you something. Then she pivots into a deeper point about contentment, and how changing everything can become its own kind of avoidance.

“Self sufficiency is not a scam, it’s not even an illusion. It’s a catch all term used by those of us who espouse it and study its canon, to mean providing as much for oneself as it is possible to do in one’s individual circumstances.”

Smallholder Journal

Self -Sufficiency Is Not A Scam

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3 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Jackie Bridgen

From the Community:

A really useful, confidence building guide for anyone who has ever bought seeds on hope alone and then wondered why nothing worked. It is practical without being patronising, and it makes a strong case for reading packets properly, and for valuing locally saved seed that has actually adapted to where you live.

Also, a quick personal note, recently told me they felt overlooked by AgStackers, and I’m genuinely sorry for that. This is meant to be a big, welcoming space, not a club, so if you want your work considered and it slips through, please nudge me. I get a lot of submissions and I would always rather fix that than miss good writing.

“Saved seed—from folks who have been growing and saving seeds in your region; and packaged seed from a company whose seed is grown in a different region—can perform very differently in your garden. Plants, and their seeds, adapt over time to where they are growing and how they are cared for.”

Gardening & Foraging for Life

Seed Packets? Don't Skip the Fine Print!

The information on seed packets can sometimes seem mysterious, especially for new gardeners. If you are planting a garden for the first time, or perhaps you have had certain veggies perform poorly in the past, learning to better understand the info on seed packets can be a huge boon. It can save you time, money, annoyance, and even heartache…

Read more

6 months ago · 29 likes · 10 comments · Gardening & Foraging for Life and Harvest McCampbell

This is a clear eyed look at school dinners and ultra processed foods that does not just wag a finger at parents. ties kids’ health to the boring bits that actually matter, funding, procurement contracts, kitchen skills, and what happens when “cheap” food becomes the default rather than the occasional treat. I also appreciated the practical ending, small acts that are realistic, especially if you are feeding children and trying to keep your head above water.

“Not only is this bad for schools but it’s rubbish for our farmers, especially small-scale producers who cannot possibly compete with Big Food.”

Make The Table Bigger

Kids, School Dinners and Ultra Processed Foods -Why We Should All Care

Headlining our national news earlier this week …not the much longed-for peace agreements in Ukraine and the Middle East that we all ache for (I refuse to bow to Trump’s crass use of the word ’deal’ here) but something no less important for the long term health and wellbeing of our children and teens: that of a n…

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4 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Patricia Gray

This one will land hard for anyone who has tried to “do regenerative right” by copying the best looking system on Instagram, then felt quietly crushed when it did not translate to their own land, weather, money, or energy. makes a simple, relieving point, there is no universal recipe, because you are working with a living system and a living life. The best bit is how she reframes frustration, not as failure, but as information, and a prompt to come back into relationship with what is actually in front of you.

“Most land challenges are not technical problems. They are relational. They are shaped by how you observe, how you interpret what you see, and how you make decisions within your unique situation.”

The Messy Middle of Regenerative Agriculture

There is no recipe for stewarding land.

Yep! No recipe here. I recognize this is not what you want to read, especially when you are in the middle of trying to make things work. It would be easier if there were a clear set of steps to follow, something that told you exactly what to do and when to do it so you could get the results you are hoping for…

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3 months ago · 4 likes

This is a clear, slightly gutting read that asks a question most of us dodge because fish are easy to distance ourselves from. walks through the science in plain language, then lands on the bit that matters, if there is a decent chance fish feel pain, our current “out of sight, out of mind” approach is not ethically neutral. The section on slaughter methods is especially worth your time, because it turns a philosophical debate into something concrete that policy and industry could actually change.

“Regardless of species differences, ethically, we should be treating all fish as if they have the potential for pain. But this is rarely reflected in real life.”

Why Welfare Matters

Do fish feel pain?

For centuries, fish have been seen by us as cold, silent, and unfeeling creatures. But is this perception really accurate? Compared to mammals, fish are rarely treated with the same level of compassion or welfare…

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3 months ago · 22 likes · 7 comments · Demi | Why Welfare Matters

This is one of those essays that quietly rearranges your thinking. starts with the way we like farming as a backdrop, then pulls you into what is actually being lost, not just farms, but the everyday knowledge that makes food real. As a dietitian she also refuses the easy binaries, and makes a strong case that health lives in patterns and competence, not perfection or online rules. If you have been feeling that the farming debate is loud but oddly empty, this will explain why.

“Not the performance of it, but the work itself. The long continuity of it. The way knowledge is handed from one generation to the next through repetition and memory.”

Steph on Food

What We Have Forgotten to Eat

Britain likes its farmers best in photographs. We like them half-hidden by mist and rain, standing in gateways with collies at their heels. We like lambs in spring fields and combines throwing dust into idyllic August evenings. Farming survives in the national imagination as something sturdy and reassuring, proof that beneath the warehouses and dual car…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Steph Goodson

If you are tired of livestock debates that collapse everything into one number, this is a refreshing read. pulls together a genuinely holistic project that tries to measure sustainability as a whole system, greenhouse gases, nutrition, welfare, and biodiversity, without letting any one metric bully the rest out of the room. The “iceberg indicators” section on welfare is especially interesting, because it shows how you can make something hard to measure more practical on real farms.

“The modelling spans greenhouse gas emissions, nutrition, farm animal welfare and grassland biodiversity — a breadth that reflects the project’s core conviction that sustainability cannot be reduced to any single metric.”

ffinlo's Substack

Data gives us the jigsaw pieces to see the bigger picture

The Pathways project is a five-year EU Horizon 2020-funded research initiative coordinated by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and involving 30 partners across 12 European countries…

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3 months ago · ffinlo Costain

This is farm business reality with a lot of heart and a sharp sense of humour. takes you into dairy benchmarking, the unglamorous but genuinely useful practice of putting your numbers on the table and letting your peers pick through them, kindly, but thoroughly. If you like writing that captures both the data side of farming and the very human feelings behind it, this is a great place to start.

“Benchmarking encourages us to lift the hood on our business, wiping away the dust to get a good look at what is working well and what could do with a bit of attention.”

This is a bracing read because it refuses the easy line that prison food should be grim by design. makes the case that decent food is about stability, health, and rehabilitation, and that the costs of doing it badly do not stay behind prison walls. The most interesting idea is the practical one, growing food on site so meals, skills, and dignity are linked, not treated as separate problems.

“Providing decent meals—food that is nutritious, culturally appropriate, and at least somewhat enjoyable—signals that people are still valued as human beings.”

Kate Grows For Chefs

Yes, I Grow in Prisons...

Why Good Food in UK Prisons Isn’t a Luxury—It’s a Necessity…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · Katie Engler

This is the kind of post I want every new entrant to read before they get pressured into taking a “just be grateful” deal. lays out contract farming in plain English, then gets very specific about what makes an opportunity viable, financially and relationally, without pretending either part is simple. I also love that she ends with nature and place, because those things do matter when you are building a life around a farm, not just a spreadsheet.

“Within the industry there seems to be a rather unfortunate attitude that as new entrants we should be grateful for any chance to farm and take anything offered.”

Anna's Substack

Working It Out

Over the course of the nearly two years we spent looking for a new opportunity eleven farms reached the stage of serious contemplation. Within the industry there seems to be a rather unfortunate attitude that as new entrants we should be grateful for any chance to farm and take anything offered. The result of this is that fairly often really unsuitable …

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3 months ago · 6 likes · Anna Bowen

This is doing what it does best, making the case through pleasure rather than preaching. It’s practical enough to be useful on a busy weeknight, but still manages to feel like a small permission slip to pay attention, to eat with care, and to keep a few standards even when life is full. Also, the kitchen sponge rant is quietly excellent, because it lands the point without turning into a lecture.

“One of the questions we’re often asked is: Slow Food sounds great, but how does it work for busy lives? The truth is that Slow Food can be “fast” food.”

Slow Food in the UK's Substack

There is beauty to eating Slowly

The jewel‑like blood oranges from the slopes of Etna were begging to be bought — and then to be nestling in a bowl on my desk. The bowl, made by hand at Stych Farm Studios in Shropshire, is a blast of colour in these early May days when the month can’t decide whether it’s the high days of June or revisiting March gloom…

Read more

3 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Slow Food in the UK

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If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

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An interactive ammonia map has been doing the rounds this month, published by Sustain and Compassion in World Farming.

If you read the headlines, you would think the story is simple. Factory farms are poisoning the air, and the map proves it.

If you read the farming press, you would think the story is also simple, just in the opposite direction. This is another campaign hit, built on shaky data, designed to denigrate sectors that are already heavily regulated.

The truth is that neither of those versions is good enough.

It is a tale as old as time, and it is the same argument I keep coming back to. We keep talking about farming as if it is one system, when it is not. Conventional and regenerative, industrial and small scale, indoor and outdoor, those differences are not branding. They are the difference between how impacts show up, and where.

This information does not appear out of thin air. But it also does not arrive as pure truth. It is collected, modelled, averaged, mapped, and then turned into claims.

So the question I keep coming back to is not who is shouting loudest. It is who is showing their workings.

The language problem

One reason this debate goes nowhere is that we keep using blanket terms, and then acting surprised when people hear something else.

When experts, campaigners, or headlines say animal agriculture is the problem, most people do not hear a technical point about emissions categories. They hear a moral verdict about meat, full stop. That is how you end up with a story where livestock can become the scapegoat for climate and pollution, and the only “solution” on offer is that everyone should eat less meat, without much detail about which systems are driving the harm.

If we want truth rather than tribalism, we have to talk about systems and scale, not just species. That is where the risk profile changes, and that is where the evidence has to be specific. Industrial livestock systems concentrate animals, concentrate waste, and concentrate the impacts in particular places. That is not the same thing as saying all meat is equally damaging, or that all livestock farming is the same.

Cows on permanent pasture, pigs in deep straw yards, broilers in high density sheds, and mixed farms cycling manure back onto land are not the same system, and they do not create the same risks. If you are trying to make sense of the ammonia map, that difference is the whole story.

The question is not just, do I eat meat. It is what kind of system did this come from, and what does it concentrate that I never have to see.

A model, not a measurement

Sustain’s map is not a set of air quality readings taken outside your back door.

It is a modelled estimate of ammonia production and emissions from the largest industrial pig and poultry units, mapped by area.

Sustain is also explicit about what the map does and does not cover. It shows only the largest intensive livestock units, it is based on average ammonia production over a life cycle, and it does not capture emission peaks, for example when sheds are cleaned out. Those limitations do not make it useless. They define what it can and cannot prove.

A tool can be directionally helpful and still be blunt at street level. The national picture and the local picture are not the same thing.

I have not worked inside a factory farm. But I do work with Farms Not Factories, so I have a pretty good idea of what happens inside intensive pig and poultry systems, and what the pressure points tend to be.

And I have my own pig experience, from small scale all the way up to producing around 500 pigs a year. Pigs are actually very clean animals. We bedded their arks with straw and they would not defecate where they slept. Outdoors, they spread manure across a much bigger area, which means it is less concentrated. Indoors, pigs are enclosed in a space that is either bedded with straw or often on a slatted floor, and that changes the whole manure story. Indoor systems require regular mucking out, then storage, then removal and spreading. Outdoor systems still need active management too, because you have to rotate and rest ground so you do not overload it, especially around feeders and water.

Pigs and poultry are often discussed together because their manures tend to be more nitrogen rich than grazing livestock, and a lot of that comes back to diet and digestion. Chickens and pigs are usually fed energy dense, protein rich rations, often grain and soya based. Protein contains nitrogen, so higher protein diets generally mean more nitrogen ends up in the manure. Cattle and sheep are ruminants, built to turn grass and forage into food through a slower microbial fermentation process in the rumen, which changes how nutrients are processed and can mean the waste is less concentrated in raw nitrogen terms.

Poultry is the extreme case because chickens do not urinate separately. They excrete faeces and uric acid together, which makes poultry manure particularly “hot”, meaning it can release nutrients fast and can drive ammonia losses if it is concentrated and poorly managed. Pig manure can also be relatively high in nitrogen compared with cattle manure, and again the housing, storage, and spreading system matters as much as the animal does.

None of this means ammonia is absent from outdoor or regenerative systems. It means the risk profile is different. When manure is dispersed and in contact with soil, you are working with a living system that can absorb and cycle nutrients. When manure is concentrated, trapped in housing, then removed and stored, you create more obvious points where emissions can build up. Scale matters here as well. The bigger the enclosed operation, the more waste you are handling in one place, and the more important it is to be transparent about what is happening, what mitigation is in place, and what the monitoring shows.

As a rough rule of thumb, fresh poultry manure is often cited as around 1.1 to 1.4 percent nitrogen, pig manure around 0.5 to 0.8 percent, and cattle manure around 0.5 to 0.6 percent, but the real world outcome depends on housing, storage, timing, weather, and how and where it is applied.

What the map is, and what it is not

The public claim, repeated across coverage in The Guardian, The Independent, and The Grocer, is that ammonia pollution hotspots cluster where intensive pig and poultry units cluster.

The mechanism is also clear.

Ammonia released from manure can react in the atmosphere to form fine particulate matter, PM2.5. Long term exposure to PM2.5 is linked to serious health outcomes.

Sustain and CIWF also point to wider ecological impacts from excess nitrogen deposition.

Those are not fringe claims. They are consistent with how ammonia is understood in mainstream air pollution science. The question is not whether ammonia can do harm. The question is what this map can prove, and what it cannot.

The pushback from the pig and poultry sectors

Farmers Weekly reports that pig and poultry organisations have rejected the claims and challenged the map. This is where the argument in the middle matters, because the most important line in that coverage is not the insult, it is the clarification. The map is based on estimates of pig and poultry numbers in each area, and even the report itself is clear it is not designed to show ammonia concentrations in the air or deposition rates.

That is a fair point to make. But it is not the same thing as proving the map is wrong. If you want to argue it is misleading, you have to show what the right inputs should be, and what difference that would make to the picture.

Facts versus claims

This is where I think the public conversation keeps going wrong. Both sides are mixing facts and claims, and then accusing the other side of doing propaganda.

A cleaner way to separate them is to ask what is checkable, and what is interpretation. Facts are things you can point to and verify, like a dataset, a method, a permitted stocking number, an emissions factor, a monitoring station reading, or a regulatory threshold. Claims are the conclusions people build on top of those facts, like this map proves your village is being poisoned, or this map is an attack on farmers, or the sector is heavily regulated therefore the sector is not a problem, or the data is insufficient therefore the conclusion is wrong.

Some of those claims might turn out to be closer to the truth than others. But you do not get there by shouting. You get there by showing your workings.

The pushback, and what would actually settle it

This is the part I want to see more of, less outrage, more evidence.

If the NPA and other bodies believe the map is inaccurate in specific places, the strongest response is not a general statement about regulation. It is location based counter evidence that the public can actually interrogate. That means naming which hotspots are wrong, and showing what measured ammonia concentrations or deposition rates look like in those places, with dates and methods, rather than just insisting the map is unfair.

It also means correcting the inputs in a transparent way. If the map used outdated permitted stocking numbers, publish the corrected numbers. If you think the emissions factors are wrong for UK systems, show why, and what factors should replace them. If mitigation measures in permitted units materially reduce emissions in practice, show the monitoring data that demonstrates that reduction, and be clear about where it is working and where it is not.

If you want to challenge a map, you do not get to do it with vibes. You challenge it with better numbers, better methods, or better ground truthing. Otherwise you are not disputing the pollution, you are disputing the discomfort of being associated with it.

This is not a culture war

This is where I think the conventional versus regenerative framing can become a trap, because ammonia is not a branding problem. It is a nitrogen management problem, and it shows up wherever large volumes of manure are produced, stored, and spread.

That can happen in systems that call themselves conventional. It can also happen in systems that call themselves regenerative or organic. The argument we need is not about which label wins. It is about what happens at landscape scale when livestock numbers concentrate, when infrastructure is missing, when enforcement is patchy, and when the public is asked to trust a system they cannot see.

The argument in the middle

Two things can be true at once. The map can be based on real data and a transparent methodology, and still be too blunt to use as a local health verdict. The pig sector can be heavily regulated, and still contribute to ammonia in ways that matter to neighbours, ecosystems, and public health.

If we want to get out of the trench warfare, we need a higher standard from everyone. Campaigners should be clear about what their map does and does not prove. Industry bodies should stop hiding behind the word regulated and start publishing the evidence that regulation is delivering the outcomes they claim. And government should stop pretending this is a culture war, because it is an infrastructure and enforcement question, and it is also a food system question.

If we keep building systems that concentrate animals, concentrate waste, and then concentrate the risk in a handful of rural places, we should not be surprised when the public starts asking what they are breathing.

If this helped you make sense of the ammonia map debate, please subscribe. Free subscribers keep the conversation going, and paid subscribers fund the time it takes to do this properly. And if you know someone who is stuck in the slogans on either side, please share this with them.

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Sources

New map exposes ammonia pollution hotspots from factory farms - Sustain

Mapped: Ammonia production from industrial livestock - Sustain

Ammonia air pollution hot spots found in parts of UK with most factory farms - The Independent

Pig and poultry sectors reject new claims about ammonia levels - Farmers Weekly

'Serious Concerns" raised about factory farming as ammonia hotspots revealed - The Grocer

Ammonia pollution hotspots found in areas of UK with most pig and poultry factory farms - The Guardian

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, to go live before Easter, but I got sick and it sat in my drafts. The headlines I am pointing to are slightly older now, but the pattern has not changed. If anything, it has become harder to ignore. The warning is still clear, and the response is still missing.

Last week I wrote that The Warning is Clear. The Response is Missing. Farmers are already building resilience, but policy and markets still reward short term thinking.

One story landed this week that says a lot about what the system rewards, vegetables being sold for 4p ahead of Easter. It is not happening in isolation. Two other very recent pieces, on input shocks and on ignored warnings inside government, help show what sits behind it.

The other two pieces are about war and shipping routes, and about a government report that seems to have vanished into a drawer. Put alongside the 4p headline, they start to look less like separate stories and more like a system that keeps rewarding short term thinking.

When Costs Jump, Everything Jumps

The Conversation reported that the conflict in Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz is already feeding through into UK farm costs. Red diesel, the rebated fuel widely used in agriculture, has risen by around 60%. Fertiliser markets are moving too. The UK imports around 60% of its nitrogen fertiliser, and around one third of global fertiliser trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which makes prices highly sensitive to disruption.

This is the part that is easy to miss if you do not work in farming. Synthetic nitrogen is not just a line on a farm budget. It is one of the foundations of modern yields, and it is fossil fuel linked. When energy markets or trade routes wobble, the cost of growing food wobbles with them.

That does not mean farmers are helpless. Many are already reducing dependency where they can. They are building fertility through rotations, legumes, composts, manures, grazing, and better soil management. But those changes take time, knowledge, and often a period of lower output while the system rebalances.

If the wider food economy is set up to punish any dip in yield, or any increase in cost, then we are asking farmers to do a transition with one hand tied behind their back.

A Report that Should Have Changed Everything

The Times reported on a DEFRA commissioned assessment completed in 2024 which warned that Britain’s food supply, water supply, and natural ecosystems were on a decline and collapse trajectory , with a realistic possibility that by 2030 they could be at strategic risk of catastrophic failure .

That is an extraordinary thing to write down in a government report. The most unsettling part is not the wording. It is what happened next. The report did not sit at the centre of public debate. It surfaced as a scoop, then drifted away again. The DEFRA Futures team was disbanded the following spring, and when the report was requested under Freedom of Information the government claimed to have no record of it.

Slow moving risks that decide whether we can keep producing food in a volatile climate get filed under worthy, then forgotten, until they show up as a price spike, a supply shock, or a political crisis. Then we act surprised, and we reach for emergency measures, and we call it resilience.

Resilience is not an emergency response. It is a design choice.

Cheap Veg is Not the Same as Affordable Food

And then there is the story that looks small, but tells you a lot about what the system rewards.

Farmers Guardian reported that Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons have cut the price of seasonal vegetables to 4p ahead of Easter, with Tesco and Sainsbury’s at 15p per item, and Asda was offering five for £1, which is 20p per item. The British Growers Association chief executive Jack Ward said “growers have seen this pattern for years”, and asked the obvious question. Retailers are prepared to invest in drastically reducing prices, but are they prepared to invest in farming and make sure growers are properly rewarded for the increased costs.

Veg at 4p might look like a bargain, but it sends a dangerous message that food has no value. Nobody blames shoppers for taking a deal when times are tight. But when produce is sold for pennies, the real cost does not disappear. It always lands somewhere else in the system.

Sometimes it lands on growers through contract pressure and risk shifting. Sometimes it lands on farm shops, veg box schemes, and local greengrocers who simply cannot compete with a loss leader. Sometimes it lands on the long term health of local supply, because if the public is trained to expect vegetables for pennies, then the businesses trying to grow and sell them have to fight uphill for every pound.

Farmers Guardian also noted that growers raised concerns at Christmas when festive staples such as Brussels sprouts dropped to below 8p per kg. Now it is 4p at Easter. That is not a one off, that is a direction of travel.

Fresh vegetables are often used as a loss leader , meaning they are sold extremely cheaply to get people through the doors, in the hope they will spend on higher margin items. Supermarkets say farmers are paid as per contract and are not financially impacted by the low retail price.

A loss leader is not a mystery. It is a deliberate choice to sell something essential for next to nothing because it gets people through the doors, and because the supermarket can make the money back elsewhere. It works because vegetables feel like a moral good. A bag of carrots at 4p looks like kindness in a cost of living squeeze, and it gives the retailer a glow of generosity while the real margins sit in the rest of the trolley.

The defence you will hear is that farmers are paid as per contract, so the grower is not affected by the sticker price. Sometimes that is true in the narrowest sense. But the sticker price still does work. It tells shoppers what food is supposed to cost. It tells every other seller in the chain what they are competing with. It tells growers what kind of retail culture they are trying to survive inside.

This is What No Response Looks Like

When I was farming pigs, I learned quickly that the numbers do not care about your intentions. If you are being squeezed on price, you do not just lose profit. You lose room to breathe. You delay repairs. You stretch feed. You put off investments that would make your system sturdier next year. You take on more risk because you have to keep cash moving. That is how a business becomes brittle.

So when vegetables are priced like a joke, it is not only an insult. It is a signal that the system is still designed to treat food as a marketing prop, not as essential infrastructure. And that is exactly the mindset we cannot afford if we are serious about resilience.

We cannot build food security on a foundation of volatile inputs, ignored risk assessments, and a retail culture that treats vegetables as disposable.

My Small Ask

If you are reading this as a shopper, a cook, a parent, or someone trying to keep the food bill under control, please do not hear this as a lecture.

If you can, make one purchase this week that backs a grower or a local supply chain that cannot compete with loss leader pricing. That might be veg from a market stall, a veg box, a farm shop, flour from a regional mill, or meat and dairy from a genuinely pasture based system.

And if you do buy veg from a supermarket this weekend, ask one simple question. Where is this grown, and what is the farm doing to protect soil and water. You are signalling demand for resilience, not just price.

If you missed my paid post on the Soil Association’s No Drought About It report, that is where I set out the practical, farm level side of this story, what resilience looks like when it is built deliberately rather than improvised in crisis.

If this work is useful to you, the simplest way to support it is to become a paid subscriber. It funds the time it takes to keep researching, writing, and publishing independently.

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Sources

No drought about it: Farming agroecologically for climate resilience - Soil Association

How the war in Iran is already affecting UK farmers and food production - The Conversation

Britain’s food supply ‘at risk of catastrophic failure by 2030’ - The Times

Major UK supermarkets criticised after reducing price of veg to 4p over Easter - Farmers Guardian

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1 or $1, this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

Three months ago there were three of us on the call. This time there were six, from different places and with different stakes in the work, and it made for a really good, practical conversation. It also meant we could talk about local food without pretending one model fits everywhere.

Huge thanks to , from Son of the Soil, , , and for bringing so much clarity and lived experience into the room.

We kept circling one question. How do you make real food easier to access, without quietly relying on farmers to carry the whole system on their backs.

Because most people do want real food. They also need it to be accessible, and accessible is not just price. It is time and transport, routine, and the friction of getting food into a normal week when you are working, parenting, caring, commuting, and trying to keep your head above water.

Adam named one of the core tensions early on, and it stayed with me because it is both true and easy to miss when you are looking for a single solution.

Markets matter. They are where trust is built, where farmers are seen, and where you can have the kind of customer relationship you do not get through a supermarket shelf. But we also talked honestly about how markets can drift, how reselling muddies the waters, and how easy it is for “farmers market” to become a label rather than a guarantee.

Cheryl brought us back to what is at stake when we get this right, and when we get it wrong.

We also talked about the practical strain on producers. The reality that you can work all week producing food, then spend your weekend hauling it, setting up, selling for hours, packing down, and doing it again, because consistency is what keeps customers coming back. That is not a complaint, it is just physics. It is one reason why the conversation kept moving toward the missing middle, the infrastructure that makes local food possible at scale without burning people out.

Adam made the case for food hubs that aggregate produce from multiple farms, use an online ordering window, and then run a single weekly pickup. Not to replace markets, but to remove friction for customers and remove some of the endless extra labour for farmers.

Sam grounded it in the reality of logistics and regulation, especially around processing. Even when there is demand, the bottlenecks are real, and they shape what can be sold and how.

Tim brought us back to resilience as a principle. If one choke point can topple the whole house of cards, then we do not have resilience. We have a system optimised for convenience and cost, and it is starting to show its fractures.

If there was one shared thread running through it all, it was this. We cannot rebuild food resilience by telling people to try harder.

We rebuild it by making real food easier to access, and by building the local infrastructure that takes some of the load off farmers so they can keep farming.

That might look like better markets. It might look like food hubs. It might look like school gardens and food education. It might look like community processing facilities, or simply more honest conversations about what food actually costs.

Probably it looks like different combinations of all of those things, depending on where you live.

• If you are new here, start with the AgStackers Directory. Liz Reitzig has built something genuinely useful, organised by location and subcategory so you can find the voices that match your patch of land and your questions.

AgStackers Directory

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Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter, a monthly place to spotlight writers sharing thoughtful work about food, farming, and the wider food system.

If you’ve ever tried to find a proper home for farming, gardening, or food system writing on Substack and realised there isn’t really a category for it, you’re in the right place. Whether you write, read, or simply care about how food is grown, you’re invited to join in and help shape what we’re building.

I’m also really excited to say the AgStacker Roundtable is tomorrow. I could not be more excited, because building community always feels like a leap of faith at the start. Thank you to everyone who joined last month, and to everyone who has been replying and showing interest since.

We’ll be running this month’s Roundtable on Zoom again, so we can all talk together properly and it can feel like a real discussion.

When: Sunday 12th April at 2pm (UK time). That’s 10am Eastern, 9am Central, 8am Mountain, and 7am Pacific.

I’ll also post a recording and recap on Substack next week, so if you can’t make it live, you won’t miss out.

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Take your time with the work shared here, and if you feel inspired, please join the conversation. This is your community as much as mine.

AgStacker of the Month:

This month’s AgStacker of the Month is Tim Connolly, a US based food security supporter and a steady presence in this community. He does not work in food or farming, but he shows up with real care and curiosity, and he is brilliant at spotting the writing that deserves a wider audience.

Tim publishes and runs , where he shares and boosts other voices across the food and farming world. One of my favourite Tim lines is that growing your own food or buying locally produced food is a quiet act of rebellion, and that spirit runs through everything he does.

Here are a few pieces from Tim and other community voices that resonated with me this month:

There is something both funny and infuriating about watching no till and soil health get treated like a fresh scientific revelation, when plenty of people have been proving it with their own fields and their own finances for years. If you want a quick reminder that the old knowledge still matters, and that the “new” solutions are often just the ones we stopped valuing, start here.

“Big Sigh from me - Folks who farm and grow their own food using regenerative practices that have been around for a long time have to wait for Science stamp their approval of what we already know.”

Mile Wide and Inch Deep

Science Reveals What Regenerative Farmers Already Know

I am republishing this article I found in Grist that is encouraging… in a way. Harper Adam University in the UK has documented the impact of Till vs No Till using some sophisticated fiber optic technology…

Read more

4 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Tim Connolly

This is a proper love letter to what you are building with the Roundtable, and it also shows why Tim matters in this space. He is not just recapping, he is translating the feeling of it, the mix of hope, frustration, and determination, and he is doing what community builders do best, connecting people, naming what is at stake, and inviting more people to step in. I also love how he lands on the practical theme that kept coming up, local food and home growing as a quiet rebellion, and then pushes it one step further by asking the harder question, rebellion against what, and what do we actually stand for.

“Growing your own food as a quiet act of rebellion was a theme that seemed to resonate in our discussion. Perhaps that is where our strength lies.”

Grange Hall

AgStacker Roundtable Premiere

It was exciting. I was invited to spend sometime yesterday morning with Helen Freeman Helen Freeman and Kody Karr Lessons from the Land talking about ourselves and what we do here on Substack and on the farm, at the first Roundtable discussion organized by Helen. Helen is in the UK raising pigs and publishes a monthly Ag Stacker Community Newsletter that I cross post here on Grange Hall…

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6 months ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Tim Connolly

This is basically the AgStackers origin story in post form, the frustration of being scattered across vague tabs, the sense that agriculture writing is everywhere on Substack but weirdly hard to find, and the refusal to stay invisible while crypto and comics get neat little signposts. Tim is doing two things at once here, pushing Substack to take food and farming seriously as a category, and building a practical workaround in the meantime with Grange Hall as a free, open noticeboard for writers who want allies and readers who want to find them.

“What about all things Agriculture? There are a bunch of us. A big bunch who write across the spectrum of all things growing and planting and harvesting and raising our food.”

Grange Hall

Petition To Add An Agriculture Tab on Substack

Thanks to the hard work of Trave Lindley, we have a petition circulating around Substack to add an Agriculture Tab on this platform. Many of us have groused long and loud about the difficulty finding and saving content on here, The tabs, Substack Team…

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a year ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Tim Connolly

From the Community:

This post from is one of the clearest explanations I have seen of how small farms survive, not through vibes or virtue, but through ordinary people showing up week after week with cash and appetite. The “Grey” character is the perfect example of a customer who does more than buy, he stabilises the whole system by taking the risk out of harvest day, and turning leftovers into plans instead of losses. It is also a reminder that when you buy direct you are not just shopping, you are helping keep a whole alternative food network alive.

“Customers don’t just take part in CSAs, farmers markets and online small farm sales. Customers create these fresh food networks.”

About the Farm

About the Farm: Creating Small Farms

If you’ve just arrived, please start at the beginning of the story. It will be more fun that way. Chapter One…

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9 months ago · 21 likes · 10 comments · Eli

This is lambing season as it actually happens, the day you thought you had off, the dash through snow in whatever you are wearing, the relief of a healthy wobbling lamb and the gut punch of the one you cannot save. is honest about the emotional arithmetic of a small flock, where losing one is both normal and still a real loss, and she captures that strange mix of exhaustion and purpose that keeps you checking cameras at 2am anyway.

“Sure, there is exhaustion in this life, and worry—the particular kind that has you checking cameras for new lambs at 2am...

But there is also joy, and beauty, and a connection to nature that I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

Maine Homestead Life

Sammy Had a Little Lamb

It was meant to be my day off. The lambs weren’t due for another week. And yet—there I was, pajama pants tucked into my muck-boots, hurrying through the snow with towels and iodine and Nutri-Drench in my arms, because Helen had other plans.🐑…

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5 months ago · 31 likes · 6 comments

This is a thoughtful piece about natural capital that does not fall into either easy camp. can see why investment models are tempting, because restoration needs money and scale, but she keeps returning to the uncomfortable bit, land is not just an asset class. When carbon and biodiversity credits start outcompeting crops and grazing, the question stops being whether nature can be priced and becomes who gets to decide what land is for, and who is left living with the consequences.

“Land produces food, carries heritage and sustains communities. Land holds cultural identity and intergenerational knowledge. Land connects soil health, human health, and local economies in ways that are not easily captured in financial models.”

This is a light, warm little provocation that still lands a real point. nudges us away from the lazy hierarchy where humans are “obviously” the smartest, and instead pays attention to the kinds of intelligence we tend to ignore, body language, collective problem solving, and the quiet competence of animals who do not need a manual to be themselves. The ant section is especially fun, because it reminds you just how much of what we call civilisation is not uniquely ours.

“According to current scientific records, humans began farming about 12,000 years ago. It’s believed that ants began farming around 66 million years ago, so needless to say we were a little late to the party.”

This is gardening as a messy, funny, slightly feral ecosystem, not a tidy checklist of tasks. Ruben’s big point is simple and true, if you want crops you need allies, lizards, sparrows, bees, whatever can help you keep the balance when the pests and weather turn up. It is also a great reminder that “failure” seasons are often the ones where you finally see how the whole system actually works.

“Gardening isn’t about pruning, deworming and fertilizing per se, it’s more about managing an ecosystem.”

Industrial Gardening

Companion Fauna

Greeted with a sudden scurrying commotion under my feet one morning, I realized two things: that winter was over and I was late to the planting season. The lizards were back and took residence under a rather small and shabby platform I deck-screwed together out of 2x4’s late last year. But what do lizards have to do with it? Well, if there’s one thing I…

Read more

6 months ago · Ruben Amiragov

This is comfort food writing with real grit underneath it. Emily starts in the dark of a migraine week, where even cooking feels like too much, and somehow turns eggs and a gently poached chicken into a kind of care you can actually manage. Then she goes deeper, into the joy and responsibility of keeping “The Ladies”, the way chickens give you rhythm, patience, and ridiculous laughter, and also the blunt lessons of loss when you get one small thing wrong.

“Rhythm- The daily rhythm they bring to your life is like a metronome beating out routine anchoring you to the here and now. I am grateful to them for this constant they bought into our lives.”

Moments through food

All Things Chickens and Eggs

Hello, Welcome to Moments through food. Here I write to you weekly from my steading in the Scottish borders, telling stories about food and ingredients alongside my slightly obsessive recipe development. I am here to give you the tools to understand how or why things work in recipes. This helps you to build confidence in the kitchen as well as being abl…

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5 months ago · 25 likes · 13 comments · Emily Cuddeford

This is the kind of piece that makes you sit up because it is not sci fi, it is a very practical warning about trust. Kristin argues that the food system is uniquely vulnerable to deepfakes because video already carries so much weight in agriculture, and because disgust and outrage travel faster than corrections ever will. The most useful part is that she does not just panic, she gives a clear, doable defence that is basically old school, document your real operation, know your “tells”, and have the relationships in place so third parties can vouch for what is true.

“Deepfakes don’t need to compromise a SCADA system or get anywhere near an Industrial System to cause real damage. They go after what I’d call the perception layer, the part of any system that decides what is true, what happened, and what should happen next.”

Kristin M King

When the Feed Is Fake: AI-Generated Video and the Food System We Trust

I spent last year writing a book about cybersecurity in food and agriculture. Ransomware hitting meat processors, IIoT concerns in fisheries, phishing attacks on co-ops, GPS spoofing on precision ag equipment, OT vulnerabilities in food factories. A f’ton to cover, and I’m proud of it! What didn’t make it into those pages is what I want to talk about he…

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5 months ago · 8 likes · 7 comments · Kristin Marie King

writes from the inside of a shift a lot of people are quietly making, from trying to opt out of harm, to trying to take responsibility for it. I like how she does not sneer at her younger self, she explains the pull of diet culture, the confusion, the moral discomfort, and then lands on a steadier argument, you cannot eat without impact, so the question becomes which systems you fund. It is a humane case for informed demand, and for supporting the farmers who are actually doing the hard work of raising animals well.

“Just because it’s sad, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. This truth calmed my inner struggle, finally untangling the mental and emotional push-and-pull I had been experiencing.”

Radical Farm: Animals, Food and Our Future

Fixing Our Food System: The Importance of Informed Consumer Demand

This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of Revive the Table. Subscribe here…

Read more

6 months ago · 4 likes · Abey Rae Scaglione

AgStackers is a community effort, and your voice is what will shape it.

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Reply to this post with your links, ideas, and anything you want me to see for next month’s AgStacker. If you’ve published something you’re proud of, or you’ve read a piece you think the community would love, drop it in the comments and I’ll pull from there when I’m curating the next newsletter.

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If you find value in this community and want to help it grow, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps AgStackers thriving and independent, and it also gives you access to the monthly AgStacker Roundtable if you’d like a more connected space to talk, swap ideas, and help shape what we build next.

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Thanks for being part of the community. Let’s see where we can take this together.

Until next month,

H x

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.

Tip Jar

No Drought About It was easy to miss. That is the problem.

A report lands that should be headline news for anyone who eats in the UK. It is clear, practical, and rooted in what farmers are already living through, yet it does not get treated like the moment it is.

It is not a secret plot. It is mostly the attention economy. We are drowning in crisis, and the loudest story wins the day. Meanwhile the slow moving risks that decide whether we can keep producing food in a volatile climate get filed under worthy, then forgotten.

The Soil Association report No Drought About It, Farming Agroecologically for Climate Resilience by Dr Hannah Blitzer and Maddy Potter Wood, makes the case that climate change is already undermining UK farming resilience. Food security is now tied to whether we build whole farm capacity to cope with heat, drought, and flooding, and whether we stop rewarding short term thinking that looks productive on paper while weakening the systems that help farms absorb shocks.

It is worth saying up front that this report has not been completely invisible. We shared it in the March Farms Not Factories newsletter with a simple line that still holds up.

“It is straightforward guidance on producing healthy food from resilient soils through mixed farming and diverse crops, while stepping back from chemical inputs and intensively reared livestock.”

Whatever your politics, you can see volatility in the fields. If you have been watching land sit under water all winter, then bake hard in summer, you do not need persuading that something has changed. What is harder is getting the rest of the food system to treat resilience as essential infrastructure rather than a nice to have.

Some people will call this climate change. Some will call it volatility. Some will call it a run of bad luck that keeps repeating. The practical question is the same.

How do we keep producing food when the seasons stop behaving.

What The Report Says

Soil is Not Just Dirt

Soils acts as water storage, flood protection, drought insurance, and a carbon bank. Healthy soils infiltrate and hold water. Degraded soils shed it. When soils fail, water takes the fastest path downhill, carrying nutrients and sediment with it. That is how you get flooded fields, stressed crops, polluted rivers, and a farming business that is always one extreme season away from the edge.

Livestock is Not a Simple Villain or Hero

The question is what system the animals are in. Industrial livestock production is framed as brittle and risk heavy because it concentrates animals, depends on imported feed, and locks farms into high input supply chains. By contrast, extensive and mixed systems can support resilience when they are aligned with rotations, forage, and nutrient circularity.

Trees Belong in the Working Landscape

Agroforestry is described as a climate solution that can cool microclimates, reduce flood peaks, protect soils, and support animal welfare through shade and shelter. It can also diversify income, but it needs long term support because trees do not pay back on the same timeline as annual crops.

Chemical Dependency is a Resilience Problem

This is not only an environmental argument. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and many pesticides are fossil fuel derived. Their prices and availability are vulnerable to global shocks. Their overuse can undermine soil biology and biodiversity, which then increases the need for more inputs.

That is a dependency loop, and it is not a stable foundation for food security.

Why This Keeps Getting Missed

That last point is where Maddy Potter Wood has been pushing the conversation, and I think she is right to do it. She argues that warnings like this can feel buried even when they are clear, practical, and urgent, and she uses current geopolitical tension as a news peg to underline a basic vulnerability.

We are already seeing how quickly that exposure can show up in farm costs, with the war in Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz feeding through into fuel and fertiliser markets.

If your food system relies on fossil fuel based nitrogen, you are exposed to energy markets, trade disruption, and conflict far beyond your farm gate.

This week, The Times reported on a Defra commissioned assessment completed in 2024 which warned the UK could be at strategic risk of catastrophic failure in food, water, and natural ecosystems by 2030. The details are different, but the pattern is familiar.

The risk is not abstract. The risk is that we keep treating resilience as a side issue until it shows up as a price spike, a supply shock, or a political crisis.

The Ten Point Plan

The report is not vague. It sets out a Ten Point Plan for building climate resilience:

1. Develop a national resilience plan for farming - Work with the Climate Change Committee on an integrated plan that prioritises adaptation and mitigation. Include both green infrastructure, like nature based solutions, and grey infrastructure, like water reservoirs, for drought, heatwaves, and flooding. Break down silos across the UK and align policy, including whole farm planning and the goal of 10% organic farmland.

2. Strengthen soil protections - Develop Soil Health Action Plans with binding soil recovery targets so all soils are under sustainable management by 2035. Make farm payments conditional on basic good soil practice, and fund practices above that baseline. Tighten rules on high risk practices, like planting maize on floodplains and cultivating steep slopes.

3. Scale up climate friendly foods - Reduce reliance on fruit and veg imports from climate vulnerable countries by doubling land for horticulture and expanding support for agroecological, organic, and small scale growers. Increase demand for British whole and minimally processed foods by investing in beans, legumes, and other alternative proteins, and by scaling local and sustainable sourcing through public procurement.

   

4. Reduce industrial livestock pollution - Incentivise mixed and extensive pasture based systems, and pair that with firm, fair regulation of industrial livestock. Use permitting thresholds and planning controls in nutrient overloaded catchments, and curb hidden support that masks the true costs of industrial models.

5. Reduce reliance on synthetic inputs - Promote organic and low input practices, including integrated pest management and extensive livestock, and improve nutrient cycling at catchment level. Cutting synthetic inputs reduces pollution, supports public health, and limits exposure to price shocks.

6. Scale up agroforestry - Expand agroforestry to 5% of agricultural land by 2030 and 10% by 2040, with half of all farms implementing it by 2050. Support whole farm, multifunctional systems such as silvoarable and silvopastoral, and provide long term funding. Remove barriers for all farmers, including tenants, and support new markets for UK grown woody products and nuts.

7. Improve monitoring and baselining, and use it in Whole Farm Plans - Invest in farmer led monitoring, verification, and reporting with robust indicators. Expand training, and consider making payments conditional on adopting monitoring. Integrate the data into whole farm planning so farmers can build resilience to economic and climate shocks while delivering public goods.

8. Make supply chains fairer for British producers - Ensure trade and tariff agreements uphold domestic standards and do not displace harms to climate vulnerable regions. Invest in regional food infrastructure, including local hubs, abattoirs, processing, and distribution, to diversify markets, support on farm value addition, and improve resilience.

9. Make private markets work for climate resilience - Strengthen governance of voluntary carbon and natural capital markets to reduce risk and enable credible blended public private finance. Markets can support land management change, but governance is needed to avoid unintended harms, including poorly designed offset schemes.

10. Invest in the right technology, infrastructure, and renewables for resilience - Fund research and innovation for on farm water storage, local renewable energy, and technology that aligns with agroecological principles. Avoid over reliance on unproven silver bullet solutions that deliver few multifunctional benefits.

You do not have to agree with every line to see the through line.

Resilience is not only about water availability and flood defences. It is about whole farm planning, advice, knowledge exchange, and fair markets that make it possible to adopt practices that keep soils functioning. It is about reducing exposure to input shocks, whether that is fertiliser prices, pesticide resistance, or imported feed risk.

It is about building systems that can take a hit and keep going.

If you do not work in farming, here is one concrete way to picture whole farm planning. It is the difference between reacting to each extreme weather event as a one off, and redesigning the farm so water has somewhere to go, soils can hold more of it, crops are less exposed, and the business is not forced into the most input heavy choices just to survive the season.

So Here Is My Ask

If you are reading this as a shopper, a cook, a parent, or someone trying to keep the food bill under control, please do not file this under interesting but not for me. Climate resilience is not a niche farming issue. It is one of the things that decides whether food stays available and affordable.

If you can, make one purchase this week that backs a farm or business building soil and diversity. That might be veg from a local grower, pulses, flour from a regional mill, or meat and dairy from a genuinely pasture based system. You are rewarding the direction of travel.

And if you buy from a veg box, farm shop, butcher, market stall, or even a supermarket, ask one simple question. Where is this grown, and what is the farm doing to protect soil and water. You are signalling demand for resilience, not just price.

Do not let this disappear under the next crisis.

And if you have seen organisations respond already, please add links. I would genuinely like to build a public trail of who is amplifying this and what they are saying, because that is how we turn a report into pressure, and pressure into policy.

Helen’s Perspective

When I say reports like this get buried, I am not trying to sell you a conspiracy. I am trying to name a pattern.

Anything that offers practical steps to avoid shortages and reshape the food system tends to be treated as optional, or ideological, or too difficult to do at scale. Meanwhile the risks keep stacking up, and we act surprised when food prices jump or shelves thin out.

A Defra commissioned assessment finished in 2024 warned that the UK’s food, water, and natural ecosystems could be at strategic risk of catastrophic failure by 2030. That is an extraordinary thing to write down in a government report, and yet it did not sit at the centre of public debate. It surfaced as a scoop, then drifted away again.

At the Soil Association, none of this is new territory. No Drought About It lays out the same direction of travel in plain English. Climate change is already pressuring farming through soil degradation, water scarcity, and more volatile seasons, and those pressures do not stay on farms. They show up in the price and availability of food.

The latest geopolitical conflict in Iran adds another layer, because it highlights a weakness we rarely talk about honestly. The UK food system is highly reliant on fossil fuel based nitrogen fertilisers. That leaves farmers and consumers exposed to global market shocks and supply disruption, while also increasing emissions and pollution.

The frustrating part is that this is not a problem with no answers. Farmers are already working on solutions that reduce dependency and rebuild resilience. Low input, agroecological, and organic systems restore soils, rebalance natural processes, and reduce reliance on synthetic fertilisers. Scaling those practices is not a lifestyle preference. It is a proven pathway to strengthening long term food security.

So my question is not whether we can do this. It is whether we are willing to treat resilience as essential infrastructure, and stop rewarding short term thinking, backing a transition to farming systems that work with nature rather than against it before the next shock forces our hand.

Sources

No drought about it: Farming agroecologically for climate resilience - The Soil Association

How the war in Iran is already affecting UK farmers and food production - The Conversation

Britain’s food supply ‘at risk of catastrophic failure by 2030’ - The Times

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Organic is having a moment again.

Not in the nostalgic back to the land way. More in the practical way. People want to trust what they are feeding their families.

The Soil Association now puts the UK organic market at £3.9bn, after more than a decade of consecutive growth. Organic chicken sales are up year on year even though it is still about three times the price. Yeo Valley is reporting turnover of £230m. Demand for natural and Greek yoghurt is up sharply. If you read the coverage, the story is simple. People are worried about ultra processed foods and they are moving towards products that feel cleaner, safer, and more trustworthy.

Since I published my last piece, the Soil Association has released its Organic Market Report 2026. It puts the boom story in crisp numbers, and it also lands the uncomfortable reminder. Organic farming is still stuck at around 3% of UK farmland.

I take that seriously. I also think we need to be careful with the question we ask. Can Organic Save British Farming?

Or is that the wrong question, because it quietly suggests that a label can do the job of a functioning food economy.

This is a deliberate follow up to my last post,

Can Organic Save British Farming. In that piece I argued that organic still has teeth as a defined standard, but that the pathway can be out of reach for too many farmers, not because they do not care, but because cashflow and capacity are real constraints.

The comments on that post were the most useful part, because they showed the whole picture.

Katie Allen, LinkedIn

I’m an organic livestock farmer, beef and lamb.

I would argue that the admin is no greater than the records we should be keeping anyway, and less onerous than Red Tractor from what I’m told. However we are 100% pasture fed and zero input, so I would say our record requirements are very simple.

We do direct sell and it makes our messaging super easy, but we also sell to a meat business that buys from us because we are organic, and that certification gives them confidence in the quality of what we are producing. Being able to sell to that meat business has absolutely revolutionised our farm business income.

For us, being organic is absolutely values based, but also underpins our income too.

I think for pork, chicken, dairy or eggs, where your input costs are so much higher, I wonder how anyone can make a good profit, organic or not.

, Substack

Interesting post Helen. As an organic licensee for 20 yrs I must say that I don’t think paying £550 a year for my license and inspection is too expensive when compared with other costs. It’s scaled according to land and size of business.

Everybody goes on about the onerous job of keeping records. Again once you know what records are needed, it’s straightforward, can be entered straight into apps, and makes you organised. Quite frankly they are the type of records that farmers and growers should be keeping so their finger is on the pulse of their business.

Like me knowing that my fields are producing more hay than the average even with no fertiliser, and the hay sells for twice that of conventional hay. And I don’t use fertilisers, glyphosate or pesticides so my biodiversity is booming.

, Substack

My little farm is as organic as you can get but sorry not worth the hassle and expense, the ten or so beef stores I sell a year already get top price in the local market anyway. I don’t need someone else telling me how to take care of my farm. That said I certainly support farms joining these schemes, just it’s not for me.

Lancashire Lamb Boxes, TikTok

Our sales are up, and we aren’t organic. As farmers we need the ability to choose what we feel is actually the best thing to do for the animal, the farm and the farm business. Being organic sticks us in a box where we then lose some of our options. We don’t farm super differently to an organic farm, but we have freedom to do what is best for our situation and no fees for being certified.

Those voices do not cancel each other out. They are the whole picture.

Organic can be a values choice, and it can be a market access tool. It can be a useful discipline. It can also be a dead end, depending on the farm, the sector, the route to market, and how much risk you can carry.

So this post is the zoomed out version. If organic is booming again, what can it genuinely do, and what can it never fix on its own.

One more thing before we get into the detail. The question is not whether organic is growing. The question is why that growth is still not translating into land use change.

What Organic Can Genuinely Offer

Organic does offer real things that matter.

It offers a trust signal in a food system that often feels deliberately hard to read. For a shopper standing in front of a shelf, organic is one of the few labels that still means something fairly consistent. It is not perfect, but it is legible.

It also offers a different approach to inputs. In plain English, organic standards restrict the routine use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. That matters for farms that want to reduce reliance on bought in chemicals, and for people who want fewer residues and fewer externalities.

There is a soil story here too. Organic is not automatically regenerative, and regenerative is not automatically organic, but the overlap is real. When you build fertility through rotations, manures, legumes, and careful grazing, you are usually doing more than chasing yield with a bag and a spray.

On livestock, organic standards can raise the floor. Stocking densities, access to outdoors, and feed rules can push systems away from the worst extremes. It does not mean every organic animal has a perfect life, and it does not mean non organic farmers do not care. It does mean there is a framework that makes certain compromises harder to justify.

Organic can also make your messaging easier.

If you direct sell, the word organic can do a lot of work quickly, because people recognise it and they trust it, even if they have never read the standards.

And for some farms, certification is not mainly about the farm shop customer at all.

It is about access.

It is about being able to sell into a meat business, a processor, or a buyer who needs a clear assurance of quality, and who will pay for it.

That is the best version of the organic promise. A clearer signal, a different input model, a chance to build soil and animal welfare into the business, and a way out of the race to the bottom.

A Premium Label Cannot Fix Squeezed Prices

Here is the part that rarely makes it into the boom narrative.

Organic cannot fix the structural constraints that are breaking farming.

It cannot fix farmgate prices when the supply chain is designed to squeeze producers first.

It cannot fix land access when land is treated as an investment vehicle, and when new entrants are competing with wealth, inheritance, and tax planning.

It cannot fix processing bottlenecks. You can produce organic milk, meat, or grain, but if there are not enough local abattoirs, dairies, mills, and packers that can handle it, you are stuck. You either travel further, accept worse terms, or you do not convert at all.

It cannot fix labour and housing. You cannot build resilient food systems on insecure seasonal labour, unaffordable rural housing, and planning rules that make it hard to house workers or diversify sensibly.

It also cannot guarantee fair margins.

Certification tells you something about the production rules. It does not automatically tell you who holds the power in the contract, who sets the price, or who carries the risk.

A farm can be organic and still be underpaid. A farm can be organic and still be trapped in debt. A farm can be organic and still be one bad year away from collapse.

And this is where Nick Coleman’s comment matters. If you are already selling locally at top price, and you are small enough that your customers know you, then certification may not add value. It may just add cost, paperwork, and a feeling of losing autonomy.

That does not make organic pointless. It makes organic conditional.

The Affordability and Access Problem

This month I have been circling the same uncomfortable truth.

Food ethics on a tight budget is not a moral failure. It is a structural problem.

People are price constrained. They are time constrained. They are exhausted.

So when organic chicken is around three times the price, the headline growth figure does not tell you who is buying it. It tells you that a segment of the market can and will pay.

That is not nothing. Premium demand can keep some farms alive.

But if organic becomes a badge for the comfortable, it will not scale in a way that changes the baseline.

It will sit alongside cheap food that is produced by squeezing farmers, workers, animals, and landscapes.

If we care about farming, food, and fairness, then access has to be part of the conversation, not as an afterthought, but as a design constraint.

Where The Boom story Can Mislead

Growth stats can be true and still mislead.

A large market value sounds like momentum. More than a decade of growth sounds like inevitability.

But growth can hide concentration. It can hide the fact that a small number of brands and retailers capture most of the value. It can hide the fact that premium markets can expand while farmer poverty remains normalised.

It can also hide the conversion gap.

Demand does not automatically translate into viable farm businesses, because the costs and risks are not evenly shared.

If you are a farmer considering conversion, you can face a period where your costs rise and your yields dip, but you cannot always sell at the organic premium yet. That is a cashflow cliff.

If you are a tenant, you may not have the security to invest in long term soil building.

If you are in a region without processing capacity, you may not have a route to market.

And if you are already depleted, you may not have the cash to buy the kit and tools that make lower input systems workable at scale.

The comment threads show something more realistic. For some farms, certification unlocks a buyer and transforms income. For others, the market is already there, and the label adds little. For some shoppers, organic is a trust shortcut. For others, it is simply out of reach.

That is not a contradiction. It is the point.

Scotland as a Case Study

Scotland is a useful case study because it shows how governments are framing organic as part of bigger goals.

The Scottish Organic Action Plan 2026 to 2029 positions organic as a tool for Net Zero and biodiversity outcomes, and as part of Scotland’s global food reputation. It also comes with some concrete movement. Scotland’s organic market value is up 20.6% in five years. Scottish land committed to organic, fully organic or in conversion, grew 26.6% from 103,900 hectares in 2021 to 131,500 hectares in 2024. The Scottish Government has also stated an initial delivery investment of £200,000.

Those are not trivial signals. They say organic is being treated as a policy lever, not just a consumer preference.

But this is where I want to ask the awkward questions.

Is £200,000 remotely commensurate with the scale of the transition being implied.

Who benefits first when organic expands.

Is it the farmer taking the conversion risk, or the retailer and processor capturing a higher margin.

Does the plan tackle market access, processing capacity, and the practical barriers that stop farms converting even when they want to.

Does it address the fact that the hardest part of conversion is often not the standards.

It is the economics, the uncertainty, and the gap between doing the right thing and being paid enough to keep doing it.

If Scotland is serious about organic as part of climate and nature policy, then the plan has to be judged on whether it shifts risk away from farmers and towards the parts of the system that can actually absorb it.

This is what it looks like when organic is treated as infrastructure, not a lifestyle choice. It is also the missing piece in the 3% story.

Here is my bottom line: Organic is a tool, it is not a rescue plan.

It can be part of a better farming future, but only if it is paired with power shifts. In plain English, those shifts look like this

• Farmers need a fair share of the final price, not just a premium label

• We need more local processing and more routes to market, so farms are not trapped by geography

• We need land access that is not dominated by speculation and inheritance

• We need planning and housing rules that let rural communities function, including workers

• We need public investment that matches the scale of the outcomes being asked for, and that supports farmers through the conversion risk

• And we need honesty about what organic can and cannot do

Because if we sell organic as the solution, we set it up to fail. If we treat organic as one lever among many, we give it a chance to do what it does best, building trust, reducing harmful inputs, supporting soil and animal welfare, and creating a market signal that can reward better practice.

Just not on its own.

I would genuinely love to hear your answer to this.

What is the biggest barrier between you and buying the food you actually want to support?

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Next up, I will be sharing my synthesis of the latest Soil Association reporting, and what it does and does not tell us about where organic is heading.

Sources

Scottish Organic Action Plan 2026 - 2029 - Scotland Food & Drink

‘Quality really matters’: why the organic food market is booming again - The Guardian

Organic Market Report 2026 - Soil Association

Feeding Britain - The Sustainable Food Trust