One of Labour's explanations for reducing agricultural property relief is that farmers aren't special. “Like everyone else,” Defra secretary Steve Reed told the Commons last week, "farmers and rural communities need a better NHS, affordable housing, good local schools and reliable public transport." I'd add an item to the minister's list: farmers, like all of us, need healthy, fairly priced and sustainably grown food.

Farmers and growers have a front row seat for how the food system isn't working. The new English farm income figures confirm why the tax change is such a blow. Profits fell dramatically in 2023/24 for every type of farm apart from pigs and poultry. Just under a third of all businesses made a loss.

Throw in the enormous, ongoing shift in the government’s support for farming, erratic and extreme weather caused by climate change, the creeping burden of supply chain audits, the urgent need to encourage more wildlife on farms and cut emissions, and the pressure on land for energy and housing. No wonder the people responsible for our primary production are worried about the future. No wonder reassurances about the Budget’s real impact are just raising the temperature further.

Farmers are not alone in struggling. Citizens do not benefit either from the status quo. Despite having some of the cheapest food in the world, 11% of people are living in households with either low or very low food security. The most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend half of their disposable income to afford the recommended Eatwell diet, including five portions of fruit and vegetables each day.

In the UK, we get more than half of our calories from ultra-processed foods which are heavily marketed and advertised and are typically high in salt, fat and sugar. We’re eating a diet directly linked to rising rates of illness and early death, which is costing us billions in extra costs for health and social care, welfare, reductions in life expectancy and quality, and lost productivity.

We have a false economy of food, as Tim Jackson calls it in his astonishing new report for FFCC. He calculates that the health costs of our diet add up to £268bn a year – more than the NHS budget and far more than is needed to fix these problems.

Making money from this mess is Big Food, the giant, transnational corporations rewarding their owners and shareholders by selling cheap, processed food at scale. Their success stands upon dangerously fragile foundations: low wages and poor conditions for food industry workers; mounting hidden costs on our health, impacts to wildlife and climate being picked up elsewhere in society; and downward pressure on the prices farmers are paid.

On Tuesday, thousands of farmers are descending on Westminster to lobby MPs and march in protest. On the same day, FFCC is hosting the Citizens Food Summit, the culmination of The Food Conversation. In deliberations across the country, the citizens who took part showed a complex understanding of these tangled issues and a desire for the government to intervene. They are firmly behind farmers growing food in ways that help nature and the climate. They sympathise with the unfair treatment of producers by supermarkets, processors and manufacturers. But they also appreciate that farming’s woes are part of a broader, unjust system.

This week is a chance to link farmers’ long-running frustrations with growing demands from citizens for action. To say that the precarious position of farming is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction. When those working in agriculture are a tiny proportion of the population, when the government rightly has to focus on improving the livelihoods of everyone, this feels like a much more powerful argument.

The ideas for change outlined in Jackson’s report – to root the right to healthy food in policy; to regulate the food environment to prevent harm; to redirect the money flows towards preventative health and sustainable production – would advantage farmers as well as citizens. In fact, this framework would address the fissures in Britain’s agriculture that inheritance tax has burst open.

I have a gentle suggestion for the London-bound on coaches, trains and toy tractors. Instead of demanding that Labour "Save Our Family Farms" or "Reverse the Tractor Tax", why not try some bolder words? The placard might read simply, "Fix Our Food".