Research · Technical report · Food, Farming and Countryside Commission
Farming Smarter: The case for agroecological enterprise
A report for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, written with the economist Tony Greenham, making the economic case for agroecological enterprise: that farming with nature rather than against it can be at once more ecological and more profitable. Beneath the headline it audits the hidden costs of industrial agriculture and the financial fragility under UK farming's apparent strength, reframes the measure of success from gross yield to value added, names the lock-ins that hold the old model in place, and sets out what a transition would need.
Co-written with the economist Tony Greenham for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, this report sets out the farm-level economics of agroecology, the family of approaches, also called ecological or regenerative farming, that work with nature rather than against it. Its claim is contrarian and precise: there need be no trade-off between profit and nature. A farm rebuilt on sound ecological understanding, and run by a skilled entrepreneur who adapts it to their own place, can improve soil, water, biodiversity and carbon while earning more, not less. Farming smarter, not harder.
The case rests on two audits. The ecological one draws on the economics of externalities to name the hidden costs that industrial agriculture keeps off its own books and pushes onto the rest of us: climate change, water pollution, poor nutrition, toxic chemicals, antibiotic resistance and the loss of biodiversity. The financial one looks under the apparent strength of UK farming, strength that turns out to be the paper value of rising land prices, and finds fragility: an average farm business income of around fifty thousand pounds, of which only about a tenth comes from farming itself, the rest from subsidy and diversification, with a large share of farms unprofitable without public support.
The economic heart of the report is a shift in what we measure, from gross yield to value added. Industrial agriculture maximises the output of a single commodity and buys in the fertility, protection and energy to do it; an agroecological enterprise substitutes those bought-in inputs with the farm’s own biological processes, and is judged by the margin and the resilience it builds rather than the tonnage it ships. The report then asks why the better model does not simply win, and answers with a set of mutually reinforcing lock-ins, after IPES-Food, that hold the industrial system in place, together with the striking fact that even the public bodies meant to steward a transition direct almost none of their funding towards it.
From this it draws three priorities for the UK. The first prefigures my later work directly: the need for robust methods to measure and quantify ecologically meaningful outcomes. The second is finance for the transition at pace and scale, which a companion piece developed into the proposal for an Agroecology Development Bank. The third is support for the agroecological entrepreneur, whose work is knowledge-intensive and carries real risk. That first priority, the measurement gap, is the problem I set out to solve years later with the EcoDynamics Diagnostic Engine.