Last week I attended virtually the annual Oxford farming conference.

It is one of the leading agricultural conferences in the world though it is not as big as the Friends of the Countryside Forum for the Future of Agriculture held every spring in Brussels.

The Brussels event is more recent and was the brainchild of former Commissioner for Agriculture Franz Fischler.

While the audience at Oxford is mainly British, the speakers certainly weren’t, with a range of international perspectives presented.

There were two over-riding concerns – the trade implications of both Brexit and climate change and the changes in British agricultural policy arising from Brexit.

Trade

Ireland is one of Britain’s key agricultural trading partners and the Irish Minister Charlie McConalogue gave a summary of Irish agriculture, its plans for continued growth in exports in value terms rather than in volume, and highlighted the long tradition of Ireland exporting to Britain, especially live cattle.

He emphasised his wish to build on that relationship but left his audience in no doubt as to the central importance of EU membership in the development of Irish agriculture. He highlighted the EU’s role in bringing Ireland to the stage where we now produce enough food to feed 40m people from a country of predominantly family farms with an average size of 83 acres and a mostly grass-based system of production.

He stressed the importance of co-ops, especially in dairying. He also emphasised the importance of off-farm income and said that about 30% of Irish farms are full-time. Not surprisingly, he stressed the importance of actions planned to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.

US trade counsel Jason Hafemeister was the first speaker and while he was in the classic US tradition of calling for a science-driven approach to regulation and market access, it was the first time I had heard a US representative admit that the method of production will count and carbon border taxes will need serious international discussions. Hafemeister reminded us of the tremendous progress made by science in driving productivity.

Today, with 8bn people, 90% are above the extreme poverty level

In 1900, with a world population of 1bn, only 16% lived above the extreme poverty line. By 1939, there were 2bn but 25% lived above the extreme poverty level. Today, with 8bn people, 90% are above the extreme poverty level.

Nuanced

However, he saw a more nuanced future, with carbon retention, cover crops, biodigestion and markets for carbon services all developing. Like the other international participants, he didn’t get involved in advising the UK on the trade policy it should pursue in a post-Brexit world.

Mel Poulton said the UK was right to have a lead-in time while it removed subsidies

New Zealand minister of agriculture Damian O’Connor said little apart from pointing out the opportunities that might be presented by the counter-cyclical seasonal production patterns in New Zealand compared with Britain. New Zealand special agricultural trade envoy Mel Poulton said the UK was right to have a lead-in time while it removed subsidies (referring to the seven-year abolition of the CAP basic payment system in England) and that while there were opportunities for high-value food markets around the world, “it’s up to you”.

Scotland was the only nation within the UK not to have a representative to give an update on its plans

From a UK perspective, the most important issues were what the government intentions were around the future of direct and environmental payments. There are differences in the approaches of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Scotland was the only nation within the UK not to have a representative to give an update on its plans. NI minister Edwin Poots was clear, focused and keenly aware of the importance of his sector in the NI economy. He said NI has the same number of cattle now as it had in the early 1970s. He saw the environmental challenges being tackled by capturing methane from ruminants and using it for transport. He wanted to have a policy for slurry separation to avoid phosphate overload while having the nitrogen fraction available to replace purchased nitrogen.

He wasn’t going to go down the re-wilding route and he declared that there is a duty to produce food for the poor.

Minister Poots said that during the second world war food was scarce and added that “we grasped science” to counter COVID-19 and for the future he backed science such as gene editing to increase productivity and achieve environmental progress.

George Eustice, the overall UK secretary for the environment as well as being responsible for England, laid out a clear agenda

He also referred to the undesirable dependence of NI dairy farming having one-thirds of its output processed in the “Republic of Ireland”, while adding that while it wasn’t a sustainable long-term solution he didn’t suggest at this stage what might be done about it.

George Eustice, the overall UK secretary for the environment as well as being responsible for England, laid out a clear agenda. He stuck to the seven-year timetable for the abolition of area-based payments and replacing them with a variety of “public goods“ incentives.

He came across as disappointed that so few English farmers had applied for the main one of these schemes – the countryside stewardship. However, he followed his implied criticism by announcing a 30% increase in the relatively modest payment. Whether this will be enough to entice in the large arable farmers of eastern England remains to be seen. Eustice singled out hedgerows as the most important environmental building block.

Self-sufficiency

Questioned on the slipping of self-sufficiency, he said the UK is about 77% self-sufficient in the food it can grow itself, with a surplus in sheepmeat and dairy, and that he was, under the Brexit arrangements, obliged to publish a report on UK food self-sufficiency.

He also set a target of planting 10,000ha of forestry in England for the future

Eustice reiterated his determination to see UK agriculture profitable but pointed out that 30% of the land produces 60% of the food. He was already examining the feasibility of EU-banned techniques such as gene editing as he saw it as a way of reducing dependence on agri chemicals in the future. He also set a target of planting 10,000ha of forestry in England for the future. England, with 9.3m hectares of farmland, is somewhat larger than Ireland with 7m but the target of 10,000 shows ambition.

Eustice is a committed Brexiteer but he is also a capable minister and a farmer. He has survived all the recent traumas in British politics and looks likely to be in position for the foreseeable future.

What should we eat – religious veganism?

For the last few years the British government has given the job of developing a national food and nutrition policy to Henry Dimbleby.

He is well regarded and logical. Part of his brief was to come up with reasons why life expectancy in Britain was so closely linked to education and personal wealth. Not surprisingly, diet and nutrition emerged as central reasons.

Diet, he declared, is the greatest cause of preventable ill health. He criticised the prestigious but latterly controversial scientific journal The Lancet for saying that he recommended reduced meat consumption. Meat, he declared, is good for you and he suggested that The Lancet viewpoint came from a “religious veganism”.

His nutrition recommendations include reductions in the consumption of highly processed foods, salt and sugar

It may he said be desirable to reduce meat production from a land use and greenhouse gas point of view but that’s an entirely different discussion. As he pointed out, farmers are now expected to sequester carbon, produce food and restore biodiversity. His nutrition recommendations include reductions in the consumption of highly processed foods, salt and sugar. The UK government has already implemented a sugar tax.

I suspect that Dimbleby would have received sustained applause

Vegan foods, he added, tend to be high margin for the manufacturer and of low health status. Nutrition, he declared, will become one of the primary sciences. If the meeting had been held in reality rather than virtually, I suspect that Dimbleby would have received sustained applause.

There was an interesting series of contributions on the place of family farms in modern agriculture. The only Republic of Ireland speaker apart from Minister McConalogue was Prof Alan Matthews, who gave the EU definition of family farming as being under family management and with 50% of the labour supplied by members of the family. He drew attention to the development of technology and productivity gains in reducing real prices over the years.

Prof Matthews gave the striking example of wheat prices in Germany being static in money terms from 1950 to 2020. He said that to stabilise numbers in farming would need increasing annual subventions, which he didn’t see any political appetite for. Many farms, he suggested, brought intangible benefits (such as lifestyle) or were subsidised by off-farm income.

He didn’t mention import standards or the beef sector nor the specifics of prospective payments coming from the UK exchequer

Northern Ireland farmer Simon Best gave an excellent account of how his family had developed an award-winning arable farm over four generations.

It’s clear that in the main, minister Eustice is well-intentioned and well-informed, but there are large blanks in policy still to be filled in. He didn’t mention import standards or the beef sector nor the specifics of prospective payments coming from the UK exchequer.

In essence, he told his audience that there will be some policies that will work and some that won’t and they can be readjusted in the light of experience – not very reassuring if you are trying to plan for the future. It is also clear that by conviction he is deeply pro-Brexit and anti-EU.