We’ve recently launched the ‘RDP Agri Sales and Marketing Salary Survey’. Why do that, you may ask, when there’s no shortage of available data covering sales and marketing jobs already out there?
Well, the simple answer is this. Agriculture is a sector in itself, not a sub-plot of someone else’s story, as it’s largely treated now. It deserves its own data, gathered on its own terms, rather than including it with other irrelevant sectors, like retail or FMCG.
A sector that defies its own numbers
I find it genuinely maddening how agriculture generally gets measured against the rest of the UK economy. The government’s own calculation puts agri’s contribution at 0.6% of GDP. Taken at face value, that figure makes agri look marginal, almost dispensable. But there’s a much bigger picture. To begin with, the sector contributes around £18.5 billion in gross value added and employs around 355,000 people. UK farmers put just under two thirds of all the food we eat on our tables. Next, there’s everything agriculture underpins – processing, manufacturing, retail, rural employment, land management, tourism… You can see why existing statistics don’t reflect reality.
Forty years of looking inward
A lot of how I think about this topic comes back to agriculture’s recent history. Four decades under the Common Agricultural Policy meant taxpayer support effectively insulated it from the market. But it also isolated agriculture from the market. The government’s farming roadmap published this summer marks a deliberate shift away from that model, towards a rural economy built on market resilience rather than subsidy dependence. And with funding moving increasingly into Environmental Land Management schemes that pay UK farming for what it produces rather than simply for existing.
But I’m careful not to romanticise about agriculture’s self-sufficiency. New Zealand went through something similar in the 1980s, when subsidies were pulled almost overnight. The resulting industry is undoubtedly more market-focused today, but only after what was, by any measure, a huge upheaval – asset prices collapsing and years of real hardship. I certainly wouldn’t be promoting a New Zealand cold turkey approach here! That would create huge disruption in our rural economy.
The lesson I take from New Zealand’s experience isn’t that market forces alone are the answer, but that agriculture left isolated, without genuinely integrated supply chains, is dangerously exposed to every geopolitical shock that comes along. Build supply chains that are properly collaborative and closely linked to the market, and that exposure shrinks considerably.
An industry right on the front line
I don’t think there’s a clearer example of agriculture’s distinctiveness than its relationship with climate change. Farmers and growers aren’t bystanders to extreme weather. They’re one of the first to feel it directly, season after season. That alone, to my mind, is reason enough to stop measuring agriculture by standards built for sectors with none of that exposure.
It’s also where I think technology has a genuine role to play, not as a replacement for good judgement but as a tool for building the resilience we need. I draw a deliberate parallel between AI and the Industrial Revolution: transformative, unsettling, and ultimately it will generate jobs and opportunities none of us can fully picture yet. In terms of producing food, or protecting the environment, none of us quite know how it will play out.
Which is the thinking behind another RDP initiative: Our AI readiness tool. It’s been built to help businesses in the Agri-business sector understand where they sit on the adoption curve and provides recommendations helping businesses to make bite-sized changes, rather than being overwhelmed. It asks questions across 7 core capabilities:
Customer Insight, Scaling Content, Your AI Operating Model, Your AI Activation, Your AI visibility, Integrated activity, Governance.
Let’s look ahead with confidence
One thing I’ve grown impatient with is the familiar refrain that governments simply don’t understand agriculture and never have. I understand the frustration behind it, but I don’t think dwelling on it gets us very far. We need to be ambitious as an industry, rather than forever trying to fall back on what’s been there in the past. Let’s be ambitious for ourselves as a sector and have the confidence to attract inward investment.
Which leads me neatly back to our salary survey. That ambition has to extend to how we see ourselves as an employer. I want agriculture recognised as a genuinely attractive career, somewhere that draws in talent on the strength of its future rather than its past. Change is never entirely comfortable and none of us particularly like it. But the alternative, clinging to a narrative of grievance or self-pity, serves nobody.
The point I keep coming back to is this: government’s role is to enable agriculture’s future, not to provide it. The roadmap, the food strategy and the land use framework all set a direction of travel through to 2050. Whether we arrive there as a confident, self-defined sector, or one still waiting to be rescued, is down to us. But agriculture is too significant, too exposed, and too distinctive to be measured by anyone else’s yardstick. There really is no business like agri business!
