Rural Economy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the memoir of the noble Baroness, Lady Batters, titled Harvest: A Farmer’s Story of Heritage, Home and Hope, has just been published. I notice that she dedicated it:

“To farmers, their families and all those who feed us”.


That is a fitting reminder of the importance of today’s debate. While the rural economy is not restricted to farmers, as we have heard, their interests and those of our whole society overlap existentially. International threats abound today, and the blocking of strategic shipping lines is a warning shot across our bows that national resilience requires domestic food production to flourish. In a free-market economy, that means that farming simply must be profitable.

As my entry in the register of interests states, I am a Farmer not only by name but by occupation. I have a farm in Hampshire and am deeply committed to the prospering of rurality.

Confidence among British farmers has fallen to historic lows: the NFU found that nearly two-thirds say that profits are declining or their business may not survive. Government polling found that only around a third feel positive about their future in agriculture. When I talk to other farmers I get a similar sense of their mood. They are asking, “How long can we hang on under the current economics of farming before having to throw in the towel?”

These economics include a low grain price, high fertiliser costs and ever-growing restrictions on pesticides. Andersen Consulting has said that last year agflation was running at 8.4%, well ahead of CPI, at 3.3%, and the prices for farm outputs were down 6.5% from the previous year. Farmers also face acres of form-filling and communications with Defra officials who seem to talk in a foreign language. They say the negative signals from these factors adversely influence whether the next generation will want to farm at all. Farming is already in the hands of relatively few people, and many are of the older generation and struggling to find skilled hired hands to farm with them.

Research confirms that our self-sufficiency is declining, particularly in certain sectors. We cannot discount the possibility of a tipping point, when British agricultural production, in effect, collapses to become irrelevant relative to the quantity of produce required to feed the population.

We had reached a similar crisis point in the 1930s, and it took significant public investment to bring UK agriculture back to life. Then there were many more people involved in agriculture and a much bigger pool of capable farmers to re-energise production. Today’s reduced numbers make this far harder—and robots are not the answer, although they might help at harvest time. Modern technology, such as combine harvesters guided by satellites, is undoubtedly much more sophisticated. But we will still need human beings for when the robotic combine header bends and needs mending. There is always a surprising number of mishaps affecting farming the whole time.

Do new employment laws allow for the exceptionalism of farming? At points in the year, very little goes on. Some farmhands work only seasonally. If people want to live in relatively remote places such as Shetland, they are required to run several jobs according to the season, and that is the norm. Should we encourage such norms to develop in farming?

In closing and to reiterate, we need to be resilient. When it comes to farming and food production, we are not. What will the Government do about this?