One shouldn’t turn up one’s nose at £65m. Dogged lobbying from the NFU, CLA and others should be commended for securing a package to help English farmers adapt as this summer’s drought and heat become more common. To announce it, the prime minister himself popped up on a Cornish farm to hear from growers – and to pack spuds and shoot some social clips. Riffing on farming’s newest cliché, he said on TikTok, ‘The ability to grow our own food is an issue of national security.’ 

We’ve heard versions of that phrase so much we rarely stop to consider its implications. Making sure everyone can eat is no doubt part of keeping the country safe. But the people who really know this stuff are despondent about the state of Britain’s defences. Albeit couched in careful language, last year’s Strategic Defence Review was withering. The authors – self-described as a politician, soldier and foreign policy expert – talked about a ‘hollowing out’ of warfighting capability and drastic need to break from business as usual. The UK, they note, faces ‘multiple, direct threats to its security’ in a world ‘beset by volatility and deep uncertainty’.   

This analogy doesn’t flatter farming. Agriculture and defence share a story of complacency and underinvestment over decades, of human and physical capacity stripped bare, of misplaced faith in scale, efficiency and technology. Within a food economy that prizes ever cheaper calories, farm incomes have flatlined, in real terms, since the 1970s. The deterioration of farmers’ health, the country’s self-sufficiency, and the organic matter in its soils are just some of the costs. Even Britain’s spies are worried about how the country will feed itself in the future. 

So quite right that farming is agog about resilience. Because this year – for all its intensity – is but a taste of what’s to come. Until humans stop burning fossil fuels the climate isn’t getting any calmer.  

Farming has to adapt, which makes Andy Burnham’s words and measures welcome. We do need more reservoirs and ponds. We do need more drought-resistant strains of wheat and barley. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the UK will be much more secure as a result.  

At Groundswell, Tim Benton chilled the circus tent with a talk on the food system’s fragility. He explained that, on a heating planet rife with conflict, we know that shocks are coming but can’t predict their form. Alongside storms, floods and droughts, there will be breakdowns in trade, cyberattacks, sabotage of deep-sea pipes and cables, and mass migration. These risks will cascade and stir up vicious cycles, as we saw after the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring – a revolution sparked by the surging price of bread. 

Building robustness against individual risks, like a dry season, is essential. But the real work lies in making the food economy fundamentally more resilient. One with stronger bones, reserves to draw on in moments of stress, and the diversity and flexibility to deal with unpredictable attacks. In the military realm, that’s what the Strategic Defence Review was calling for. Sure, the UK must re-invest in bases, ships and missiles, but it also needs the armed forces and government to be more agile and prepare for unexpected threats through a ‘whole-of-society approach’.   

On farms, this broad and deep resilience means restoring that degraded capacity in soils and wildlife, as well as the wellbeing of farm workers, the profitability of their businesses, and the trust between government, industry, farmers and citizens. It means rapidly adopting smart and flexible ways of using land for multiple benefits, such as agroforestry for food, shade, nature, and sequestering carbon. It means growing a wider range of crops with different strategies, expecting that some fail and some flourish. Using less fuel and fertiliser that comes from overseas and passes through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz. Rearing animals on more home-grown forages, instead of grains and soy dependent on the global market and competing for land with food for people and room for wild plants and animals. All of this could be aided by robotics, artificial intelligence and even precision fermentation, so long as they don’t create new vulnerabilities in the process. 

Food security goes beyond farms. In a resilient food economy, we’d tweak our diets to match that more diverse cropping and reduced reliance on commodity grains: a touch less meat, a lot less ultra-processed junk, more fruit, vegetables and pulses. We’d lead an almighty push to reduce and redirect food waste, equivalent to a quarter of all the nation’s grocery shopping. We’d also need a more decentralised and varied supply chain, one not so reliant on a few massive manufacturers, retailers, grain merchants, and abattoirs. Though it might not ever dominate, a revitalised middle ground of local and regional processors is a national insurance policy, while also giving farmers more options and keeping value in communities.  

This is where government and industry need to be pouring energy and resources – as years of research has shown. And fortunately, most of these changes contribute to the challenge we can’t forget. The danger of putting so much attention on adaptation is we take our eye off decarbonising Britain’s economy, including its food system. However people feel about the language, however the issue is dragged into a culture war, getting the UK and the world to net zero emissions is what helps everyone in the long run.  

That conversation can be hard. Over June and July, FFCC ran a series of deliberative discussions with farmers across England to support Defra’s forthcoming farming and climate strategy. From Northumberland down to Cornwall, we heard frustration with short-term policy and how farmers – particularly those with cattle and sheep – felt targeted by carbon-centric thinking. We were met, time and again, with bemusement about why minimising emissions was the priority.  

But we walked away optimistic. Those farmers weren’t rejecting the need to act. Despite grumbles about the carbon tax on fertiliser, they recognised that getting fossil fuels out of farming will, ultimately, help. They preferred that reducing agriculture’s climate impact was woven into everything that helps farms become more profitable and resilient. There are plenty of well-developed schemes and initiatives already, across the four nations, and decarbonisation could be more explicit in all of those. It’s the job of government to set standards, focus state funds strategically, martial private money for public value, and start a frank, constructive conversation about the areas we know are difficult but unavoidable, such as the methane that will always come from ruminants and the need to alter how some land is used. 

A couple of years ago, Liz Bowles, who’s just announced she’s stepping down as CEO of the pioneering Farm Carbon Toolkit, made a passing comment that’s stayed with me. She said that net zero was more than a target met by ticking off practices and technologies. It requires transforming much of how we farm and go about our lives – all for the good. 

The UK can’t adapt its way, crisis by crisis, through this volatile world and expect to stay safe and well fed. We all need the humility and confidence to bend, to say out loud that business as usual won’t cut it, to act like the future will not look like the present, in our fields and on our plates. Farmers and citizens say they’re up for it. They need political and business leaders who will help them through the painful problems of today but also prepare for the reality of a different future.