31/08/2026
Britain now produces just 60% of the food it consumes by value.
That is down from 65% the year before.
Now look at what we are actually good at producing.
Defra's latest figures show:
🥛 Milk: 105%
🐑 Mutton and lamb: 103%
🥚 Eggs: 88%
🐄 Beef and veal: 84%
🌾 Cereals: 81%
🐔 Poultry meat: 80%
🐖 Pig meat: 67%
🥕 Fresh vegetables: 56%
🍎 Fresh fruit: 14%
Notice anything?
The foods Britain comes closest to being self sufficient in are overwhelmingly produced by animals.
Meanwhile we grow little more than half of our own fresh vegetables and just 14% of our own fresh fruit.
Yet we are continually being told that the answer to a more sustainable food system is fewer animals and more plants.
There is a fairly substantial problem with that theory.
Geography.
Britain is not California. It isn't Spain. It isn't Brazil.
Only around a third of UK agricultural land is considered croppable.
Huge areas of this country are permanent grassland because the soil, gradient, rainfall, altitude or climate make cultivation difficult or completely impractical.
However, they grow grass.
Lots of it.
Britain is extraordinarily good at growing grass.
Trouble is humans can't eat grass.
Cattle and sheep can....
They take something growing on land that often cannot directly produce food for humans and turn it into beef, lamb and milk.
That isn't an unfortunate inefficiency in our food system.
It is one of the great advantages of British agriculture.
And we have been rather good at it for a very long time.
Hereford.
Aberdeen Angus.
Shorthorn.
Suffolk.
British livestock genetics have been exported around the world and helped establish some of the great livestock industries of America, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.
Then history handed Britain a rather brutal lesson in food security.
In 1939 Britain was heavily dependent on imported food.
Then war came.
Ships carrying food across the Atlantic were being sunk and suddenly food security stopped being an academic discussion.
Rationing began in January 1940.
Britain ploughed more land, grew more crops and prioritised the food that could be produced efficiently at home.
In July 1940, while Britain was fighting for its survival, the government introduced the National Milk Scheme.
Expectant and nursing mothers and children under five were given access to a pint of milk every day at a heavily subsidised price, with free milk available to poorer households.
Think about that.
A country at war.
Shipping under attack.
Food rationed.
Imports threatened.
And Whitehall looked at the foods Britain could reliably produce from its own landscape and decided milk was important enough to protect for young children and mothers.
Milk produced by cows.
Eating British grass.
More than 85 years later, we seem determined to forget the lesson.
We are talking about taking agricultural land out of production.
Reducing livestock numbers.
Covering land with competing uses.
Importing more food.
All while Britain has just fallen from 65% to 60% food self sufficiency.
Of course we need fruit and vegetables.
Of course we need imports.
Nobody sensible is suggesting otherwise.
Seriously, there is no realistic version of Britain where we suddenly become self sufficient in oranges, avocados or almonds.
There absolutely is a version where Britain produces most of its own beef, lamb and milk.
That is because we already do.
We have an island covered in millions of acred of grass.
We have the climate to grow it.
We have the livestock capable of converting it into high quality human food.
We have generations of knowledge about how to do it.
And we have one of the most sophisticated livestock industries in the world.
Perhaps food security should start with producing more of the things our country is naturally good at producing, rather than importing replacements for them.
When the world becomes unstable, food security suddenly matters very quickly.
Do not let anybody talk us into importing the one thing we have never needed to buy.
🇬🇧🐄🐑
