Landowners should look to regenerative agriculture for their future

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is a historian and public speaker

Before Brexit, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was a boon for UK farmers and landowners, who received £3.2bn in subsidies in 2015 alone. A report from Greenpeace, the environmental lobby group, found that landowners featured in the Sunday Times Rich List received more than £10mn in CAP payments that year.

Things are very different today, now that CAP payments have gone, alongside Britain's membership of the EU. "It is tough!" says Johnny Wake, a former NHS doctor who runs Courteenhall Estate, a landed estate with 2,000 acres in Northamptonshire and Norfolk. The problems are manifold: "Those who have a lot of debt at high rates, who are very dependent on conventional farming for profit or [who] are dealing with succession challenges tend to be in a very tight corner these days."

Diversification is key, he says, and sustainability too, both of which have made him a leader in regenerative agriculture: in essence, restoring soils damaged by ploughing and pesticides. He now assesses the carbon his work emits, farms beef and arable crops more sustainably, and invests in technology. He enhances soil health with increased biodiversity and reduced chemical use through precision farming -- the pinpoint application of fertiliser and insecticides. To Wake, farming is a long-term affair, where the environment is a partner in cultivation. His entrepreneurial bent has helped his business and made his approach a lesson for the UK's other large landowners.

Wake's family, said to descend from the 11th-century warrior Hereward the Wake, is aristocratic -- he is set to inherit a baronetcy -- and first farmed in south Northamptonshire in the 13th century. He has been managing partner of Courteenhall Estate (named after the family's 350-year-old stately home) since 2013, where he has introduced the "no-blame" culture to his team that he admired during his NHS days. (This encourages people to report mistakes.)

When Wake won the prestigious Bledisloe Gold Medal (awarded by the Royal Agricultural Society of England for "outstanding achievement" in managing a large estate) in 2023, he was commended for putting "community, sustainability and legacy at the heart of every decision made". His work "sets examples for estates across the whole of England". Five months ago, Courteenhall Estate received The King's Award for Enterprise in the sustainability category -- only the second agricultural business to win this in its 60-year history.

Wake takes a wry view of the Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes that have replaced CAP payments in England. "The irony is that we in the UK actually, for once, did something that really impressed other countries when we created [the ELMs]," Wake says. "Our public money for public environmental good was seen as the vanguard. And when we'd just about got it right, we screwed it up" with political indecision and a lack of policy continuity.

The big money for landscape recovery now goes to big organisations, which are experts at putting together bids rather than delivering on the ground, he says. Meanwhile, the rest of the scheme has been capped, both in terms of money per landholder and the total pot sizes, and a September window for applications was chaotic. This has, Wake believes, killed land managers' faith in the schemes to deliver for either their businesses or nature.

"Capping a big estate's ambitions for nature might make the government feel better, but it doesn't help nature," Wake says. "And no landholder is making big money out of the environmental schemes like they were with the old subsidies: the aim of them is to prevent them from losing money by doing things to help the environment -- or to minimise those losses."

Opportunities still remain after the capping, but the larger schemes are hard to tap into if you are not a major player, such as the National Trust. Wake says that "a theoretically better way of running things would be to pay on results rather than actions". But he concedes this would be hard to achieve in practice.

Governments in most countries know that plain agricultural subsidies cannot continue to be justified in the modern world. The CAP, set up in 1962, will hand out €387bn between 2021 and 2027 -- 25 per cent of the EU's budget. "Regen ag" is only going to gain in both financial and environmental attractiveness.

In early September, Wake's Courteenhall Estate co-hosted a conference on environmentally sensitive farming. A coachload of people from the European Landowners' Organization attended, and their view of the CAP seemed to be that, in the short to medium term, it is locked in as a method of delivery. But most of them felt that it was unjustifiable and that eventually the public would force a political change. Supporting regeneration, for the public good, would seem to be the way ahead, even though it is a slow process.

"Regenerative farming takes time, financial and emotional commitment, and the journey is not a straight line," says Wake. "It would be helpful if government and industry recognised this in the ways they try to support regen ag."