The Government's 25-year Farming Roadmap is right to recognise that food production, profitability and environmental resilience must sit together. However, it could have been stronger had it borrowed more confidently from the French approach to agriculture: treating farming not merely as a sector to be managed, but as a strategic national asset.
France has long understood that food production is bound up with national resilience, regional identity and rural prosperity. The UK's roadmap speaks warmly about food security, but it stops short of embedding farming at the heart of national economic policy. A stronger plan would have set out how British agriculture will be protected from short-term policy changes, supported across successive governments and treated with the same seriousness as energy, defence or infrastructure.
The roadmap could also have placed much greater emphasis on value-added production. France excels not only because it produces food, but because it turns raw agricultural output into premium regional products: cheeses, wines, meats, butter, fruit and specialist foods with strong local identities. Britain has world-class produce too, from Westcountry cheddar to Scotch beef and Welsh lamb, but too much value is still lost when raw ingredients leave the farm gate. A more ambitious roadmap would have included a national strategy for regional food brands, on-farm processing, local abattoirs, rural food manufacturing and export promotion.
Public procurement is another missed opportunity: France has a stronger tradition of linking schools, hospitals and public institutions with domestic and local producers. The UK plan could have made a clearer commitment that taxpayer-funded food should support British farmers wherever possible, while improving nutrition and shortening supply chains. This would give farmers more stable markets and help reconnect communities with local food production.
The roadmap also needed a stronger generational plan. France's agricultural education system, training routes and advisory networks provide a useful model for attracting younger people into farming and supporting innovation. In Britain, an ageing farming population, high land costs and uncertainty over succession threaten the future of the sector. A 25-year plan should have been explicit about new entrants, apprenticeships, agricultural colleges, technology skills and access to land. Dropping the Family Farm Tax would have improved the certainty needed for investment in smaller farms.
Finally, the French approach shows that environmental policy works best when it is tied to productive farming rather than seen as an alternative to it. The roadmap could have made clearer that nature recovery, lower emissions and food production must be delivered together through precision farming, better infrastructure, innovation and practical advice.
In short, the roadmap contains worthwhile ambitions, but it lacks a strong enough national mission. A truly long-term plan should not just ask farmers to adapt; it should help Britain build a more self-confident, productive and proudly domestic food economy.
