A Rebuttal from the Land: The Real Future of British Farming

Professor Dieter Helm's recent analysis on "The Future of British Farming" paints a powerful, if distance-first, picture of a sector on the brink of an inevitable corporate and technological revolution. From the ground up - from the perspective of someone with mud on their boots, capital at risk, and a multi-generational understanding of the land - it misses fundamental realities of farming in this country.

Helm argues that unstoppable forces of technology, finance, and policy will sweep away the traditional family farm. Helm is right that capital, data, and regulation are reshaping where value accrues in agriculture; ignoring these pressures would be naive. But his thesis overstates the pace and scope. The phenomenon he describes - consolidation, financialisation, technological change - is not revolutionary. It is creeping, as it has been for decades, perhaps centuries. Yes, the pace may be accelerating, but this is evolution, not rupture. And in a broader societal context where far more disruptive forces are moving on far faster trajectories, farming's transformation will remain constrained by biology, culture, and the limits of consumer acceptance.

Technology: Evolution, Not Revolution

Helm's portrayal of technology as a force that will render the farmer obsolete reveals a fundamental disconnect from operational reality. His comparison of digitalisation to the Haber-Bosch process is a category error. Haber-Bosch shattered a core biological limit - it changed what was physically possible. Today's digital tools refine choices and offer incremental gains within existing biological constraints. A farm remains governed by soil biology, animal husbandry, and weather.

More fundamentally, Helm misunderstands how AI will integrate into farming practice. His vision of "maths graduates in offices" running farms is already outdated - and reveals a curious blindness to what's actually happening with AI in 2025. The world's leading mathematicians are now openly acknowledging that large language models can solve problems that stumped human experts, with large language models demonstrating mathematical reasoning capabilities that exceed all but the most elite specialists. These same AI capabilities are accessible from any desktop, any smartphone, to anyone with an internet connection.

The implication is profound: you don't need to employ the mathematician when the AI that outperforms the mathematician is available as a tool. The useful future is not replacement but augmentation: a grazier using AI to optimise weekly rotations based on soil moisture data and seven-day weather forecasts, or a grower using NDVI imagery to time nitrogen applications at sub-field scale. The farmer retains ground-truth, makes the final call, and now has analytical capability that rivals specialist expertise. Generative AI democratises access to advanced analysis rather than concentrating it in corporate structures. Technology empowers the practitioner who holds essential local knowledge, not the office-based specialist Helm imagines.

The Tenant Farmer: Entrepreneur, Not Agent

This leads to Helm's significant misreading: his characterisation of tenant farmers as devolving into "land agents or managers." Tenants shoulder full financial risk - price volatility, animal health crises, weather losses, tenancy insecurity - while financing working capital and equipment. We make every operational decision. Managers draw salaries and take direction.

By area, approximately 31% of English farmland is under formal tenancy agreements (DEFRA Structure of the Agricultural Industry, 2023), with additional land farmed under contract farming arrangements and seasonal grazing licences. By count of farm businesses, approximately 87% of English farms are owner-occupied or mixed-tenure operations (DEFRA, 2023). The apparent contradiction reflects different metrics: many businesses own some land while renting additional acreage, and a relatively small number of large landlords own significant total area measured by hectares.

The government's Rock Review (2022) explicitly recognised the tenanted sector's critical role in food security and environmental delivery, noting that tenanted farms often demonstrate higher rates of innovation and environmental scheme participation than equivalent owner-occupied holdings. To dismiss this as farmers "blurring the distinction" into becoming mere labourers fundamentally misreads how British agriculture operates.

Helm's framing betrays an assumption that "real" farming requires land ownership. Many of Britain's most productive, innovative farms are tenanted operations run by entrepreneurs who've chosen to deploy capital into operations and technology rather than locking it into expensive land. The landlord-tenant relationship is ancient and has proven remarkably adaptive across centuries of economic change.

Financialisation: Spreadsheet Logic vs. Custodial Reality

Helm predicts farmers will "securitise their land" to unlock capital - a move that makes sense only on a spreadsheet. For a farmer, land is not merely an asset; it is a legacy, a responsibility, and the foundation of family identity spanning generations. The primary duty is custodial: to pass the land on in good heart to the next generation. This intergenerational rationality operates on timescales that financial markets cannot comprehend.

Recent market data from Savills (2024 Farmland Market Survey) shows institutional and lifestyle buyers now account for approximately 17% of farmland transactions by volume over 2021-2023. This doesn't represent farmers willingly financialising their operations. It represents external capital seeking inflation hedges and stable returns - a symptom of wealth inequality driving investment patterns into land as a safe asset class.

The actual greatest threat to family farm continuity isn't a failure to securitise - it's the age-old challenge of succession and fair inheritance division among multiple children, now exacerbated by recent inheritance tax changes that penalise farmers for decisions made under different policy regimes.

The Missing Stakeholder: The Public

Helm builds his technologically-advanced future - synthetic biology, gene-edited livestock - without adequately accounting for consumer acceptance. These represent fundamental changes to how food is produced, not just incremental efficiency gains.

Recent experience demonstrates that consumer acceptance cannot be assumed. Retail trials of Bovaer - a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from cattle - faced public pushback and retailer caution in 2024 despite regulatory approval. If a relatively minor intervention like feed additives triggers consumer resistance, the path to acceptance for heavily gene-edited crops faces significantly higher barriers.

The reality of consumer behaviour is more complex than simple narratives suggest. The Food Standards Agency's Food and You 2 survey (2023) shows that 68% of consumers consider "knowing where food comes from" important or very important in purchasing decisions - but price remains the dominant factor for most households. Farm shops, farmers' markets, and subscription box schemes exist and succeed, but represent premium segments, not mass-market behaviour.

What matters for Helm's thesis is that there's a floor to public acceptance. Consumers may primarily buy on price, but there are limits to what production methods they'll tolerate, particularly when conventional alternatives remain available. Heavily modified organisms face consumer scepticism that creates genuine market risk, regardless of production cost advantages. The persistence of diverse farm models - including smaller operations serving local and premium markets - reflects segmented consumer demand across different price points and production preferences.

Social licence isn't about universal public affection for farmers; it's about maintaining sufficient public acceptance that production methods don't trigger regulatory or market backlash. Helm's assumption that economic efficiency arguments alone will smooth adoption of radical production changes underestimates this constraint. The gap between regulatory approval and market acceptance can be substantial and persistent.

The Political Assumption: Policy Trajectory as Contested

Helm treats tightening environmental regulation and the 2020 Agriculture Act's principles as inevitable, a locked-in policy trajectory. But recent electoral swings demonstrate that the environmental policy consensus Helm assumes is fragile. Agricultural policy exists within democratic politics, not above it. The "polluter pays" principles and environmental intensification Helm describes as determined may instead prove highly contested, potentially reversing or hollowing out the very policy framework his analysis depends upon.

History suggests that agricultural policy is vulnerable to political swings - witness the repeated CAP reforms, or the gap between UK climate targets and agricultural policy implementation to date.

Consolidation: Creeping Change, Not Rupture

To be clear: consolidation is real and ongoing. DEFRA data shows the largest 9% of farms (by output) now produce approximately 61% of English agricultural output by value (2023). This represents genuine structural change. But this is stratification of the sector, not the wholesale transformation Helm envisions. And critically, this is not a new phenomenon - farm consolidation has been a feature of British agriculture for generations. The rate may be faster now, but the direction is old.

More importantly, Helm's assumption that scale always delivers efficiency doesn't hold across all farming types. My own analysis of dairy farm performance data reveals counter-intuitive diseconomies of scale at certain size bands. Larger dairy operations face specific operational challenges. Local community pushback against mega-dairies constrains expansion. Slurry management in Nitrate Vulnerable Zones becomes increasingly complex and costly at scale - you can't simply export it economically. TB restrictions in endemic areas make it difficult to move calves, creating problems that intensify with herd size. Technology may ameliorate some of these issues, but the biological, regulatory, and social constraints create genuine friction against scale. His thesis may have more applicability to arable farming - where my own knowledge is most limited.

Operations like Beeswax Agriculture - which Helm cites as evidence of farming's evolution toward corporatisation - represent external capital generated in other sectors being diversified into land as a stable asset class. This is a symptom of societal wealth inequality and investment patterns. The middle may thin, and some segments may see corporate entry, but resilient owner-operators and tenants continue adapting - through both diversification, and fundamental changes in production economics that challenge Helm's scale assumptions.

The Bigger Context: Relative Speed of Change

Helm's analysis suffers from tunnel vision. He presents farming's technological and structural changes as uniquely dramatic, comparable to the Haber-Bosch revolution. But consider the actual pace of disruption elsewhere. Generative AI is already eliminating entry-level positions across professional services - UK graduate recruitment fell 12% in 2024, with AI automation cited as a primary factor (Institute for the Future of Work, 2024). The traditional career ladder in knowledge work is collapsing within months of new capability releases.

Compare that to farming. A field of wheat still takes months to grow. Soil health improvements take years. The biological constraints of seasons, weather, and soil microbiology impose hard limits on pace that knowledge work doesn't face. While office-based workers face potential career obsolescence within years, farmers face evolutionary adaptation over decades. The changes Helm describes are real but creeping, not revolutionary - especially when viewed against genuinely disruptive transformations happening elsewhere in the economy.

The Economic Alternative Helm Misses

Helm's dismissal of regenerative farming as merely "glyphosate-enabled no-till" reveals a critical blind spot. He misses what practitioners like Chris Clark - working with collaborator Brian Scanlon - have actually developed: Maximum Sustainable Output.

The economic logic is straightforward: maximize "free issue energy" from the sun through photosynthesis and biological processes, while minimizing purchased (energy based) inputs - artificial fertilizers, compound feeds, diesel. It's input cost reduction while maintaining or improving output value per pound spent. Maximise free issue energy on-farm rather than purchasing it, uses diverse rotations to build soil fertility biologically, and manages grazing to capture solar energy as animal product without bought feed. Critically, this addresses both Helm's economic pressure and environmental concerns simultaneously. Farms reduce input costs (improving margins without subsidies), reduce pollution (avoiding "polluter pays" penalties), and build soil carbon (potential environmental payment revenue).

Working farms are demonstrating viable margins through biological intensification that works with natural systems rather than against them. When you properly account for pollution costs and remove distorting subsidies, the economically rational choice may not be maximum external inputs at corporate scale, but rather maximum biological efficiency at a scale suited to local management. My own analysis of dairy systems shows optimal scale may be constrained by practical realities: animal husbandry attention requirements, slurry disposal limitations in NVZs, calf movement restrictions in TB areas, and community acceptance thresholds - all of which create friction against the unlimited scale Helm assumes. His analysis may be more relevant to arable systems, but even there, his blanket assumption that scale drives efficiency deserves scrutiny.

Helm sees only conventional intensification or corporate takeover. He misses the third path already being walked by working farms that prove his economic determinism wrong.

Conclusion

The future will be forged by resilient, entrepreneurial farmers - both owners and tenants - using technology as a tool and honouring the commitment to land stewardship that spans generations. Farming's future is more robust, more biologically grounded, and more human than Helm's over-tidy model suggests.

Professor Helm has impressive credentials and genuine influence on policy. But influence without ground-truth understanding produces elegant theories that crash against operational reality. The changes he describes are real but creeping, not revolutionary. In a world facing genuinely disruptive forces - where AI is restructuring entire professions within years - farming's evolution will remain constrained by biology, seasons, and the limits of consumer acceptance of production methods.

The future will be determined by practitioners adapting technology to biology, not the other way around - proving daily that resilience and grounded judgment trump deterministic theory.

Helm contrasts family businesses in agriculture with their absence in other industries and seems to assume agriculture is simply following the same inevitable path. But he should stop to ask why family farms have persisted where family steel mills and family car manufacturers have not - and whether the conditions that enabled that resilience may continue to prevail.

Never underestimate the 'culture' in agriculture.