Spring and the lighter evenings have a way of pulling you back outside. Not just physically – into the garden and veg patch, out to the fields, on longer dog walks – but mentally, too.
And it’s fair to say that the last few weeks have done exactly that for me. I’ve found myself re-energised, drawn into conversations that remind me why I’m still so engaged with agriculture and the world that surrounds it.
So this isn’t my ‘usual’ article with a single, tidy thread running through it. It’s more a personal round-up of things on my mind right now. Some are big-picture industry matters. Some are closer to home. But they’ve all got me thinking.
Why are there no ‘Chartered Agriculturalists’?
The first thing I’ve been mulling over is a discussion I’ve had the privilege to be directly involved in. It’s around the introduction of chartered status for people working in agriculture. Think Chartered Engineers, Chartered Accountants, and Chartered Surveyors. Then imagine that same stamp of credibility, applied to Agriculturalists.
Having Chartered status just carries an inherent weight. People know it means you’ve worked hard, you know your stuff, and you maintain that knowledge over time. I’ve been privileged to be involved in this debate as part of some work RDP has been doing with the Society of Agriculture. The idea is that chartered status could be available to anyone working in agriculture. Farm workers, farm managers, even professionals in other sectors (like chartered surveyors) who may want to add a specialism to their credentials. Of course, it would need to be a rigorous qualification to be credible and have ongoing requirements to maintain to maintain its validity. But that’s the point. Done properly, it sends a signal to the wider world that we take professionalism in the production of food, fibre and fuel incredibly seriously. That’s not all. For younger people coming into the sector, having a clear professional pathway – something to aim for, something respected both inside and outside the industry – could be genuinely transformative.
Agriculture is made up of many different organisations, and right now great efforts are being made to gain genuine industry-wide consensus before pushing this forward.
Why the machinery of government really matters
The second thing on my mind is the sheer amount of often invisible work that goes on behind the scenes to keep our government well-informed on industry issues, so the machinery of food production can keep moving forwards. I’m fortunate to see this hard work up close through our clients the Agricultural Industries Confederation and the NFU.
Right now, with the situation in the Middle East continuing to create huge ripples, there are real-world pressures on farmers across the UK. Fuel prices have climbed. Fertiliser availability and cost is a daily concern. I’ve even heard that some farmers have considered not drilling at all this spring. These aren’t abstract policy problems. They’re decisions being made in farm offices right now.
What is encouraging is that government is getting facts rather than hearsay. And our industry bodies work tirelessly to ensure that’s the case. That work isn’t always understood (certainly not by the general public) and arguably sometimes not even within our own sector. According to UK government figures there are 460,000 people working in agriculture across 209,000 farm holdings (although over 50% of these are less than 20ha). Yet the NFU, for example, has approximately 43,000 members. Surely it deserves more support and recognition?
There has been some genuinely positive news on the policy front. The release of the Land Use Framework, which puts food at the centre of a long-term, 25-year strategy through to 2050, feels like a meaningful step forward. For too long, environment strategy and food strategy have sat in silos. We can’t rewild everything and expect to keep eating well. It’s a naive approach that ignores the reality of how land use works. The fact that this framework is trying to stitch those two things together, alongside a Farming Roadmap due later this year, is encouraging. Farming has always been good at taking the levers it’s given and acting quickly. Just give us clarity and we’ll get on with it.
CO2, bioethanol and the supply chain we’ve forgotten about
One story that almost slipped quietly under the radar involves CO2. Not the kind we’re trying to reduce this time, but the industrial gas that keeps food fresh, supports medical procedures and is a by-product of bioethanol production and fertiliser manufacture (this finished in the UK when CF closed its last remaining plant).
We once had two bioethanol plants in the UK (Ensus and Vivergo) both of which used grain and maize to produce fuel. Both shut down after the UK-US trade deal effectively flooded our market with American bioethanol, with the US quota almost exactly equating to the combined output of those two British plants. Something like two million tonnes of grain market availability disappeared almost overnight!
Now, with the Middle East war disrupting CO2 supply chains, the government has stepped in with funding for Ensus to temporarily reopen. It’s a decision driven by necessity, but it’s also an opportunity. A relative glut of cereals on world markets right now means that reopening these plants could provide a genuinely useful domestic outlet for grain.
AI in agriculture: it’s already here, whether we’re ready or not
The final thread running through the last few weeks has been AI. Or specifically, how agriculture is grappling with it. What’s interesting isn’t just the technology itself, but the level at which the conversation is now happening. It’s no longer for the ‘techies’. AI is something that’s exercising the people at the top of agricultural businesses.
But still most farmers don’t particularly want to hear about artificial intelligence as a concept. What they want are solutions that work within their systems and make them more efficient. That’s actually the right instinct. The AI challenge, or opportunity, sits largely with the businesses supplying products and services into farms. That’s where the integration needs to happen first.
A good example of what this looks like in practice? Camera systems in dairy parlours that monitor how cows move as they walk in and out, flagging lameness before it becomes a serious problem. The implications of undetected lameness are significant: drops in productivity, greater disease susceptibility, difficulties in getting back in calf. Prevention is always cheaper than intervention. That principle holds whether you’re running a dairy unit, a broadacre arable operation or a horticultural business. Healthy animals and healthy plants, grown in healthy soil, require less bought-in input. It’s as simple as that.
At RDP we’ve also been doing our own work in this space. We’ve launched tools that help agri and animal health businesses become more visible within AI-driven search environments, manage and track their communications performance in real time, and convert written content into more engaging audio and visual formats. The way people consume information is changing fast, and the agriculture sector needs to keep pace.
Still engaged. Still excited
So as you can see, my head has been full – Chartered status, land use policy, bioethanol supply chains, AI in agriculture — on the surface, they don’t belong in the same article. But for me, they all speak to the same thing: why agriculture continues to be one of the most complex, fascinating and genuinely important industries there is.
