Farming & Agriculture
Abolish DEFRA • Regional Farmer Alliances • Treat Before Cull
Farmland Protection • Heritage Methods • Right to Repair
Local Slaughterhouses • Right to Farm • Grow British
The Problem
British farming is being destroyed. Not by weather, not by disease, not by lack of demand — but by a system of governance that treats farmers as administrative subjects to be regulated, inspected, fined, and ignored. The people who actually grow the food, raise the livestock, and maintain the land have no meaningful say in the policies that govern their work. Instead, they answer to DEFRA — a government department run by career civil servants and advised by industry lobbyists, neither of whom have ever calved a cow, drenched a sheep, or pulled a plough.
Since the 1990s, British farming has lost more than 33,000 farms. Dairy herds have been halved. The average age of a British farmer is now 59 years old. Young people are not entering the profession because the economics don’t work — the price a farmer receives for a litre of milk is often less than the cost of producing it, while the supermarket that sells it posts billions in annual profit. Tenant farmers are squeezed between rising rents and falling returns. Family farms that survived two world wars are being sold off because the next generation cannot afford to inherit them.
Meanwhile, farmland is being taken out of food production at an accelerating rate. Solar companies lease fields at rates farmers cannot compete with. Speculative developers buy agricultural land, sit on it until planning permission inflates the value, and sell it for housing estates. Rewilding schemes funded by carbon credits pay landowners to stop farming entirely — which sounds like conservation until you realise it means importing the food those fields used to grow, from countries with lower welfare standards, higher food miles, and no accountability to British consumers.
And when disease strikes — foot and mouth, avian flu, bovine TB — the government’s first and often only response is mass slaughter. Millions of healthy animals have been killed as a precaution because the bureaucratic apparatus has neither the infrastructure, the local knowledge, nor the political will to quarantine, test, and treat. The 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis saw approximately 6 million animals culled. Farmers who had built herds over generations watched them burned in fields. Many never recovered. Some took their own lives.
This is not a farming policy. It is a managed decline, administered by people who do not farm, advised by corporations who profit from farming’s failure, and funded by a subsidy system that pays landowners for owning land rather than farmers for growing food.
BUILD will end it. Completely.
Pillar 1: Abolish DEFRA
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has failed. It is too large, too distant, too bureaucratic, and too captured by corporate interests to serve the people it was created to represent. BUILD will abolish it and replace it with something that actually works.
1.1 — Why DEFRA Has Failed
DEFRA is a Whitehall department headquartered in London. It is responsible for food production, animal welfare, environmental protection, rural communities, water management, fisheries, and forestry — an absurdly broad portfolio administered by people whose daily commute involves the Tube, not a tractor. The department’s leadership rotates through the standard Whitehall carousel of career civil servants, political appointees, and ministerial reshuffles. A Secretary of State for Environment may have been Secretary of State for Transport six months earlier and Secretary of State for Health six months before that. They are not specialists. They are not farmers. They are politicians who have been handed a brief.
The department’s advisory apparatus is dominated by agribusiness interests. The corporations that manufacture pesticides advise on pesticide regulation. The supermarkets that crush farm-gate prices sit on food strategy panels. The developers who want to build on farmland contribute to planning consultations. The result is policy that consistently serves corporate interests while telling farmers it was designed for their benefit.
DEFRA’s response to every crisis follows the same pattern: commission a review, publish a strategy, announce a consultation, delay the consultation, publish interim findings, revise the strategy, announce a pilot scheme, underfund the pilot, declare the pilot inconclusive, commission another review. By the time any action is taken, the crisis has either resolved itself, been superseded by the next crisis, or destroyed the communities it was supposed to help.
The agency structure beneath DEFRA is equally dysfunctional. The Environment Agency, Natural England, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, the Rural Payments Agency, the Forestry Commission — each operates semi-independently, with overlapping jurisdictions, contradictory guidance, and separate enforcement regimes. A farmer can receive conflicting instructions from three different agencies about the same piece of land in the same week, each threatening penalties for non-compliance with rules the others have contradicted.
This system is beyond reform. It does not need reorganisation. It needs replacement.
1.2 — Regional Farmer Alliances
BUILD will replace DEFRA and its agency apparatus with a network of Regional Farmer Alliances — county-level or multi-county bodies run by working farmers, for working farmers, with real decision-making power over agricultural policy in their region.
Structure
Each Alliance covers a natural agricultural region — broadly aligned with historic counties and farming geography, not arbitrary administrative boundaries. The Devon Farmers Alliance covers Devon. The Cornwall Farmers Alliance covers Cornwall. The Kent Farmers Alliance covers Kent. The Yorkshire Farmers Alliance covers Yorkshire. And so on across England, with the exact boundaries determined by consultation with the farming communities themselves.
Each Alliance is governed by a council of working farmers elected by the farmers in the region. To sit on the council, you must be actively farming — not retired, not a landowner who leases to others, not an agribusiness executive, not a civil servant. Working farmers only. Elections are held every three years, with term limits to prevent entrenchment. The council elects its own chair and appoints its own staff.
Powers
Regional Farmer Alliances will hold statutory authority over agricultural policy within their region. This includes: animal health and disease management; veterinary services and cost-sharing; land use and agricultural planning advice; environmental stewardship on farmland; subsidy allocation and administration; inspection and compliance (proportionate, supportive, farmer-led); training, apprenticeships, and agricultural education; local food network development and market support; and emergency response to weather, disease, and other agricultural crises.
The Alliance does not answer to Whitehall. It answers to the farmers who elected it. National coordination on issues that require it — trade policy, international veterinary standards, cross-border disease management — will be handled by a National Farming Council composed of elected representatives from each Regional Alliance, not by a government department.
Funding
Regional Farmer Alliances will be funded by a direct allocation from the agricultural budget, distributed per region based on farmed acreage, livestock numbers, and regional need. This is not a grant that can be withdrawn at ministerial whim. It is a statutory funding settlement, guaranteed by law, reviewed every five years, and adjusted for inflation. The money that currently funds DEFRA’s London headquarters, its executive salaries, its consultancy contracts, and its agency bureaucracy will be redirected to the regional alliances that actually serve farmers.
1.3 — Shared Veterinary Services
Veterinary costs are one of the largest and least predictable expenses in farming. A single calving complication, a lameness outbreak, a case of mastitis in a dairy herd — any of these can cost hundreds or thousands of pounds with no warning. Small farms and tenant farmers are disproportionately affected because they cannot absorb unexpected costs the way a large agribusiness can.
Each Regional Farmer Alliance will operate a shared veterinary service. Member farmers contribute to a regional vet fund based on herd or flock size, and in return receive veterinary care at cost rather than at private practice rates. The Alliance employs or contracts veterinarians directly, negotiates bulk pricing on medicines and treatments, and operates mobile veterinary units that travel to farms rather than requiring farmers to transport sick animals.
This is not a radical concept. It is how veterinary cooperatives work in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and parts of Germany. Farmers share the cost, share the risk, and get better care at lower prices than the fragmented private model delivers. The corporate veterinary chains that have been buying up rural practices and raising prices will face genuine competition from a cooperative model that prioritises animal health over shareholder returns.
The shared veterinary service also provides the infrastructure for BUILD’s quarantine-and-treat policy (Pillar 2). When every region has veterinary capacity on call, funded and ready, the excuse that mass culling is the only affordable response to disease outbreaks disappears.
Pillar 2: Quarantine and Treat Before Cull
Mass culling is not disease management. It is administrative convenience dressed up as biosecurity. BUILD will end the default assumption that the cheapest and easiest response to animal disease is to kill everything in a postcode.
2.1 — The Culling Catastrophe
The 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the United Kingdom resulted in the slaughter of approximately 6 million animals. The majority were not infected. They were killed as a ‘precautionary’ measure under a contiguous cull policy that required the destruction of all susceptible livestock within a 3-kilometre radius of a confirmed case, regardless of whether those animals showed any sign of disease. Farmers who had built herds over decades — rare breeds, bloodlines, genetic stock that took generations to develop — watched them destroyed in days.
The trauma inflicted on farming communities was immeasurable. The financial cost to the rural economy was estimated at over £8 billion. The mental health impact — depression, PTSD, suicide — has been documented in multiple studies and continues to affect farming families two decades later. And the policy itself was contested at the time: vaccination was available, had been used successfully in other countries, and was advocated by veterinary scientists. The government chose culling because it was faster, cheaper in the short term, and preserved the UK’s ‘disease-free’ export status. The animals, the farmers, and the communities paid the price so that trade statistics could be maintained.
This pattern has repeated with bovine TB, avian influenza, and every subsequent disease outbreak. The reflex is always the same: kill first, ask questions later, compensate inadequately, and move on.
2.2 — The New Protocol: Test, Quarantine, Treat, Monitor
BUILD will replace the cull-first model with a mandatory four-stage protocol for all notifiable animal diseases:
Stage 1: Test
Rapid on-farm testing of all animals in the affected area. Modern diagnostic technology — PCR testing, lateral flow assays, blood screening — can identify infection status within hours, not days. The Regional Farmer Alliance’s shared veterinary service provides the testing capacity. No animal is destroyed until its disease status is confirmed.
Stage 2: Quarantine
Confirmed positive animals and their immediate contacts are quarantined on-farm or at regional quarantine facilities operated by the Alliance. Movement restrictions are imposed within a defined radius, but only for susceptible species — not a blanket lockdown that prevents farmers from moving unrelated livestock, accessing markets, or continuing normal operations with unaffected stock.
Stage 3: Treat
Where treatment is available, it is administered. Where vaccination is available and effective, it is deployed — to the affected animals and to at-risk animals in the surrounding area. The UK’s historic reluctance to vaccinate livestock has been driven almost entirely by trade considerations — the EU and some export markets distinguish between ‘vaccinated’ and ‘disease-free’ status. BUILD will not sacrifice animal welfare and farming livelihoods to maintain a trade classification. DIVA (Differentiating Infected from Vaccinated Animals) tests exist for most major livestock diseases and are used routinely in countries that vaccinate. The technology to vaccinate and still prove disease-free status is available. The only barrier is political.
Stage 4: Monitor
Recovered and vaccinated animals are monitored through the Alliance’s veterinary service, with regular testing until the outbreak is confirmed contained. Data is shared between Regional Alliances through the National Farming Council to track disease patterns and inform prevention strategies.
2.3 — Culling as Last Resort, Not First Response
Culling will only be authorised when all of the following conditions are met: the animal is confirmed positive for a disease with no available treatment or vaccine; the animal is suffering and cannot be humanely maintained; quarantine has failed to prevent transmission despite proper implementation; and the decision is made by the Regional Farmer Alliance’s veterinary team, not by a civil servant in London.
Contiguous culling — the policy of destroying all livestock near an infected premises regardless of their health status — is abolished. An animal that is not infected will not be killed because it lives near an animal that is.
Compensation for any animals that are culled will reflect the full market and genetic value of the animal, not a bureaucratic table of ‘standard values’ that ignores bloodline, breeding potential, and decades of selective work. A prize bull with twenty years of genetic selection behind it is not worth the same as a commercial store animal, and the compensation system will reflect that.
Pillar 3: Protect Farmland for Food
3.1 — Ban New Solar and Wind on Agricultural Land
Agricultural land exists to grow food. The current model, where energy companies lease farmland for solar installations because it is cheap and easy to obtain planning permission, is a market failure caused by a subsidy system that makes solar panels on farmland more profitable than crops. The result is productive fields covered in glass panels, growing nothing, feeding nobody, while the country imports the food those fields used to produce.
BUILD will ban all new solar and wind installations on land classified as agricultural. Solar panels belong on rooftops, car parks, industrial buildings, brownfield sites, and motorway verges — not on land that should be growing food. Offshore wind belongs offshore. The argument that Britain needs to sacrifice farmland for energy security is false — we have more than enough non-agricultural surface area to deploy solar and wind where it does not compete with food production.
3.2 — Existing Solar Agreements: Fair Terms for Farmers
BUILD will not retrospectively void existing solar lease agreements. Contracts are contracts, and farmers who have signed them did so within a legal framework that permitted it. However, the terms of those agreements will be reformed to ensure the farmer genuinely benefits.
Under current arrangements, a farmer who leases a field for solar typically receives a fixed annual rent per acre while the energy company sells the generated power at market rates, often making many times the rent payment in revenue. The farmer provides the land, bears the visual impact, loses the productive capacity of the field, and receives a fraction of the value generated.
BUILD will legislate that any existing solar agreement on agricultural land must provide the host farmer with: free electricity for all farm operations and domestic use, drawn from the installation on their land, for the duration of the agreement; and a fair annual rent that is index-linked and reviewed every five years against the energy revenue generated by the installation, not a fixed payment agreed a decade ago at rates that no longer reflect the market.
If the energy company does not agree to revised terms, the farmer has the right to terminate the agreement with a reasonable notice period, and the energy company must remove the installation and restore the land to agricultural condition at its own cost. The farmer’s land is not a permanent donation to an energy company’s balance sheet.
3.3 — Ban Speculative Land Banking on Farmland
Speculative developers buy agricultural land at agricultural prices, then sit on it — sometimes for years or decades — waiting for planning permission to be granted or for local plan allocations to reclassify it for development. When that happens, the land value increases from thousands per acre to hundreds of thousands per acre overnight. The developer sells or builds, and the community gets another housing estate on what was a working farm.
BUILD will close this loophole. Agricultural land that is currently in food production or capable of food production will be reclassified as a protected national asset. No change of use will be permitted while the land is classified as agricultural. Reclassification will require proof that the land is genuinely unsuitable for farming, not merely that it would be more profitable as housing.
Land banking — purchasing agricultural land with the stated or evident intention of holding it for future development rather than farming it — will be subject to compulsory purchase at the agricultural value paid, plus inflation, with no development premium. If you buy a farm field and do not farm it, you do not get to profit from its eventual conversion to housing. The land was meant to grow food. That is what it will do.
3.4 — Rewilding: Conservation, Not Abandonment
BUILD supports genuine conservation and biodiversity restoration. What BUILD does not support is paying landowners to stop farming and then calling it environmental policy. The current rewilding movement, funded increasingly by carbon credit schemes, takes productive farmland out of food production, replaces domestic food supply with imports, and generates profit for the landowner and the carbon trading intermediary while the public pays higher food prices and the farmer down the road loses a competitor and a neighbour.
Conservation and farming are not opposites. They are complementary. Hedgerow restoration, wildflower margins, beetle banks, traditional grazing patterns, coppicing, and managed woodland all support biodiversity while maintaining productive land use. BUILD’s subsidy reform (Pillar 6) will fund these integrated approaches rather than paying landowners to do nothing and calling it rewilding.
Pillar 4: Grow British
4.1 — The Import Problem
Britain currently imports approximately 40% of its food. Some of that is food that cannot be grown domestically — bananas, coffee, citrus. But a significant proportion is food that can be, and historically was, produced in Britain: lamb from New Zealand, beef from South America, apples from South Africa, cheese from continental Europe. We import food that British farms can produce because the global supply chain makes it cheaper to ship food thousands of miles than to pay a British farmer a fair price for it.
This is not efficiency. It is a subsidy from low-wage countries, lax environmental standards, and taxpayer-funded shipping infrastructure that makes the true cost of imported food invisible at the checkout. The price of a New Zealand lamb chop does not include the carbon cost of shipping it 11,000 miles, the welfare cost of transporting live animals across oceans, or the economic cost of the British sheep farmer who went out of business because he couldn’t compete with a country that has 6 sheep for every person.
4.2 — The Grow British Campaign
BUILD will launch a nationwide ‘Grow British’ campaign to increase domestic food production and reduce import dependency. This is not a marketing exercise. It is a structural programme with real policy behind it.
Retailers will be required to label the country of origin prominently on all fresh produce, meat, dairy, and processed food. Not in small print on the back of the packet. On the front. Where the customer sees it before they pick it up. Consumers consistently report that they would prefer to buy British if they could easily identify which products are British. The current labelling regime makes this deliberately difficult because supermarkets profit from consumer confusion.
Public procurement — schools, hospitals, prisons, military, government offices — will prioritise British-produced food. There is no reason why a school dinner should contain imported chicken when British chicken is available. Public money should fund British farms, not subsidise foreign agribusiness.
Seasonal eating will be promoted through the campaign, reconnecting consumers with the natural production cycle of British agriculture. Strawberries in June, not January. Asparagus in April, not imported year-round from Peru. Brussels sprouts at Christmas, not shipped from the Netherlands when they grow perfectly well in Lincolnshire.
4.3 — Natural Animal Diets by Default
Livestock should eat what they evolved to eat. Cattle are ruminants designed to eat grass. Pigs are omnivores designed to forage. Chickens are ground-dwelling birds designed to scratch and peck. The industrial farming model that feeds grain, soy meal, processed feed concentrates, and in some cases recycled animal protein to animals that would never encounter these foods in nature produces cheap meat at the expense of animal health, meat quality, environmental sustainability, and consumer trust.
BUILD will mandate natural-diet-first feeding standards for all livestock. Grass-fed beef and lamb. Pasture-raised pork. Free-range poultry with access to forage. Supplementary feed is permitted where nutritionally necessary — in winter, during pregnancy, for young stock — but the default feeding regime will be the diet the animal evolved to eat. This is not a premium standard. This is what farming should be. The factory farming model that produces cheap, low-quality protein by keeping animals indoors on industrial feed will be phased out.
4.4 — Heritage Methods Protected and Legalised
Raw milk from tested herds. Traditionally cured bacon. Farmhouse cheese aged in the cellar. Proper sourdough. Dry-aged beef hung for weeks, not days. Heritage apple varieties. Heirloom seeds. Traditional smoking, salting, pickling, and preserving.
These methods produced safe, high-quality food for centuries. The current regulatory framework treats them as health hazards while permitting industrial processes that are demonstrably more dangerous — chlorine-washed chicken, ultra-processed food engineered in laboratories, meat pumped with water and phosphates to increase weight. The regulation is not protecting consumers. It is protecting corporations from competition by heritage producers whose products are better.
BUILD will legalise and safeguard heritage food production methods. Regulation will be proportionate to the actual risk, not to the lobbying budget of the industries that compete with traditional producers. Raw milk from regularly tested herds will be available for direct sale without the bureaucratic obstacles that currently make it nearly impossible. Traditional curing, smoking, and preserving methods will be recognised as legitimate production processes, not treated as regulatory violations.
Pillar 5: Local Slaughterhouses and Butchers
5.1 — The Closure Crisis
In 1990, there were approximately 1,000 abattoirs operating in England and Wales. Today there are fewer than 250. The closure of local slaughterhouses has been driven by EU-derived regulation that imposed multinational-scale compliance costs on small operations, making it economically impossible for a local abattoir to remain viable. The regulations were designed for industrial meat processing plants handling thousands of carcasses per day. When applied to a village slaughterhouse processing fifty animals a week, they are absurdly disproportionate.
The consequences are severe. Farmers now transport livestock hundreds of miles to the nearest available slaughterhouse. Animals that once walked to a local abattoir are loaded onto trucks, driven for hours, unloaded into an unfamiliar environment, and slaughtered under stress. The journey increases cortisol levels, reduces meat quality, increases the risk of injury and disease transmission, burns fuel, blocks roads, and costs the farmer money that a local facility would have saved.
Consumers lose too. When there is no local butcher supplied by a local slaughterhouse, the only option is supermarket meat — processed through industrial supply chains where traceability is opaque, provenance is questionable, and the connection between the animal and the product on the shelf has been deliberately severed.
5.2 — Rebuild the Local Network
BUILD will reverse the closure of local slaughterhouses by reforming the regulatory framework to make small-scale operation viable again. Regulation will be proportionate to scale and risk. A village abattoir processing fifty animals a week will not be required to meet the same infrastructure specification as a factory processing five thousand. The hygiene standards will be identical — because hygiene is non-negotiable — but the physical plant requirements, staffing mandates, and documentation burdens will reflect the actual scale of the operation.
Start-up grants and interest-free loans will be available through the Regional Farmer Alliances for farmers, butchers, and community groups establishing local slaughterhouses and butchery operations. Planning permission for agricultural abattoirs will be streamlined, with a presumption in favour of approval where the facility serves an identified local need.
Every animal deserves a good death. That means minimal transport, familiar surroundings where possible, competent and compassionate handling, and effective stunning. A local slaughterhouse five miles from the farm delivers better animal welfare than a factory abattoir two hundred miles away, regardless of how many inspectors the factory employs.
5.3 — Ethical Slaughter Standards
All slaughter in England will be stunned. No exceptions. BUILD will ban all non-stun slaughter, including halal and shechita methods that permit animals to be killed while fully conscious. This is an animal welfare position, not a religious one. An animal should not experience a prolonged death for any reason. Freedom of worship does not include the freedom to cause unnecessary suffering to animals.
All meat will be clearly labelled with the method of slaughter, the country of origin, and whether any religious ritual was performed. Consumers have the right to know what they are buying. The mixing of ritually slaughtered meat with general supply will be prohibited. If meat has been subject to a religious process, that must be stated on the label, not hidden in the supply chain.
Pillar 6: Subsidy Reform
6.1 — End Payments for Owning Land
The post-Brexit agricultural subsidy system — the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) — was supposed to replace the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy with a system that paid farmers for ‘public goods’ rather than simply for owning land. In practice, it has been chaotic, underfunded, late, and designed in a way that favours large landowners and conservation organisations over working farmers.
The old CAP Basic Payment Scheme paid farmers per hectare, regardless of what they produced or how they managed the land. A billionaire landowner with 10,000 acres of grouse moor received more in subsidies than a family dairy farmer with 200 acres of productive grassland. The system rewarded ownership, not farming. ELMS has not fundamentally changed this — it has simply replaced ‘payment for acres’ with ‘payment for environmental management’, which in practice still favours those with the most land and the most capacity to navigate a Byzantine application process.
6.2 — Pay Farmers to Farm
BUILD’s subsidy system is simple: public money pays for food production, environmental stewardship that is integrated with food production, and agricultural infrastructure that supports both. The money goes to people who are actually farming — not to landowners who lease their land to others, not to conservation charities that buy farmland and take it out of production, and not to carbon credit speculators who profit from abandonment.
Subsidies will be administered by the Regional Farmer Alliances, not by a London-based payments agency. The Alliance knows which farms in its region are producing food, maintaining land, and contributing to the local agricultural economy. It does not need a 40-page application form and a six-month processing time to determine that a working farm deserves support.
Payments will be weighted toward: active food production on the holding; regenerative and organic farming methods that build soil health and reduce chemical dependency; hedgerow restoration, wildflower margins, beetle banks, and other biodiversity measures integrated into productive farming; young farmers and new entrants to the profession; and small and medium holdings that form the backbone of rural communities.
Payments will not be available for: landowners who do not farm the land they own; rewilding schemes that remove productive farmland from food production without replacing the lost capacity elsewhere; carbon credit schemes that pay for land abandonment; or any entity that is not a working farm or a cooperative of working farms.
6.3 — Redirect Subsidies to Regenerative Farming
Regenerative agriculture — farming methods that build soil health, increase biodiversity, reduce chemical inputs, and sequester carbon while maintaining food production — will receive preferential subsidy rates. This includes: cover cropping and green manures; no-till and minimum-till cultivation; rotational grazing and mob grazing; agroforestry and silvo-pasture; composting and natural fertility building; and integrated pest management that reduces or eliminates chemical inputs.
These methods are not theoretical. They are practised by thousands of farmers in Britain and globally. They produce food. They build soil. They support wildlife. They reduce costs. And they receive almost no support from a subsidy system that was designed around industrial agriculture and has never been redesigned despite decades of evidence that the industrial model is destroying the soil it depends on.
Pillar 7: Farm Machinery — Right to Repair and Durability
7.1 — 10-Year Guarantee
All agricultural machinery sold in England must carry a minimum 10-year durability and support guarantee. This means the machine must be designed and built to operate reliably for at least 10 years under normal agricultural use, and the manufacturer must make all critical parts and software available for the full 10-year term. No planned obsolescence. No locked software. No ‘authorised dealer only’ repair restrictions that force farmers to pay premium rates for work that any competent mechanic could do.
A combine harvester costs upwards of £300,000. A modern tractor costs £100,000 or more. These are not consumer electronics with a two-year upgrade cycle. They are industrial machines that a farmer buys once and expects to use for a decade or more. The manufacturer’s obligation does not end at the point of sale.
7.2 — Right to Repair
Modern agricultural machinery is increasingly controlled by proprietary software that prevents farmers and independent mechanics from performing repairs. John Deere, the world’s largest tractor manufacturer, has been at the centre of this controversy for years — their machines require dealer-authorised software access to perform basic diagnostic and repair functions, forcing farmers to wait for a dealer technician (often days, during harvest) or to pay inflated service charges for work they could do themselves.
BUILD will legislate a full right to repair for all agricultural machinery. Manufacturers must publish repair manuals, diagnostic software, and parts catalogues. They must make parts available at fair prices to independent repairers as well as authorised dealers. They must not use software locks, DRM, or proprietary protocols to prevent the owner of a machine from repairing, modifying, or maintaining their own property. A farmer who buys a tractor owns a tractor — not a subscription to a manufacturer’s service network.
7.3 — Fair Servicing and End-of-Life
Mandatory annual servicing must be offered at fixed, fair, published rates. The current practice of charging whatever the market will bear for routine servicing — particularly during busy seasons when farmers cannot afford downtime — is exploitative and will be curtailed.
At end of life, manufacturers must offer a buyback or recycling scheme for their machinery. Agricultural equipment contains significant quantities of steel, copper, electronic components, and hydraulic fluid, all of which have recycling value. The farmer should not bear the cost and logistics of disposing of a machine the manufacturer designed, built, and profited from. Take it back. Recycle it. Offer the farmer a fair trade-in against a replacement. This is how responsible manufacturing works.
Pillar 8: Agricultural Chemicals — Independent Science, Not Corporate Lobbying
8.1 — Ban Harmful Pesticides and Herbicides
Immediately outlaw chemicals known or suspected to contribute to gastrointestinal conditions, coeliac-like symptoms, endocrine disruption, or neurological damage. This includes glyphosate, atrazine, and similar compounds. The evidence linking these chemicals to human health harm is extensive, growing, and consistently contested only by the corporations that manufacture them.
The precautionary principle applies: if there is credible, peer-reviewed evidence that a chemical causes harm to human health, animal health, or the environment, it is banned until proven safe. Not permitted until proven lethal. Not ‘restricted’ to a level that the manufacturer claims is safe while funding the research that supports that claim. Banned. Completely. Until independent science — funded by the public, not by the manufacturer — demonstrates safety beyond reasonable doubt.
8.2 — Independent Science Board
Food and agricultural chemical regulation will be transferred from DEFRA (and its successor arrangements) to an independent science board with no industry ties. Board members must have no financial interest in any company that manufactures, distributes, or profits from agricultural chemicals. No former industry executives. No consultants who have received industry funding. No revolving door between the regulator and the regulated.
The board will commission and publish its own research, funded from the public agricultural budget, and will make all data, methodology, and findings publicly available. The era of industry-funded safety studies submitted to industry-influenced regulators is over.
8.3 — Mandatory Disclosure and Transparency
Every farmer and producer must declare every chemical or treatment used in the growing, storage, or processing of food. This is not a burden on good farmers — it is a competitive advantage. When consumers can see that one product was grown without synthetic chemicals and another was sprayed six times with glyphosate, they make better choices, and the farmer who produces clean food benefits.
A national public transparency database will list every product’s full chemical footprint. Any consumer will be able to look up any food product sold in England and see exactly what chemicals were used in its production, at what concentrations, and at what stage. This database will be maintained by the independent science board and will be freely accessible online and in public spaces.
Pillar 9: Right to Farm
9.1 — Farms Were Here First
Across England, a pattern repeats itself. A housing developer builds an estate on the edge of a village, next to a working farm. The new residents move in. Within months, the complaints begin. The cockerel is too loud. The tractors are too early. The muck spreading smells. The cattle are frightening the children. The silage clamp is unsightly. The farmer, who has been farming that land for decades or generations, suddenly finds himself defending his right to continue doing the thing the land was always used for.
In too many cases, the farmer loses. Environmental health officers serve noise abatement notices. Planning conditions restrict operating hours. The farmer is told to stop doing things that were perfectly acceptable before someone built houses next to his fields and sold them to people who apparently expected the countryside to be silent and odour-free.
9.2 — Statutory Right to Farm
BUILD will legislate a statutory right to farm. Any farming operation that predates adjacent residential development is protected from nuisance complaints arising from normal agricultural activity. Normal agricultural activity includes: livestock noise (cockerels, cattle, sheep, pigs, all of which make noise because they are animals); machinery operation during normal working hours (which in agriculture means early morning to late evening, because that is when farming happens); muck spreading and slurry management; silage making; harvest operations (which may run through the night in good weather, because the crop will not wait for office hours); crop spraying and dust generation; and the general sights, sounds, and smells of a working farm.
If you buy a house next to a farm, you are buying a house next to a farm. The farm is not going to become quieter, cleaner, or less agricultural because you moved in. If you wanted silence, you should not have bought a house next to a cockerel. The developer who sold you the house next to a working farm without making that clear has questions to answer. The farmer does not.
Developers will be required to include agricultural proximity notices in all sales documentation for properties adjacent to or within 500 metres of working farms, clearly stating that the property is near a farm and that normal farming activity — including noise, odour, vehicle movements, and seasonal operations — will continue.
9.3 — Protect Farmers from Planning Encroachment
New housing developments will not be approved on land adjacent to working farms unless the developer can demonstrate that the development will not interfere with farming operations and that future residents have been clearly informed of the proximity to agriculture. Buffer zones between new housing and existing farm boundaries will be mandatory, with a minimum distance that prevents the gradual encroachment of residential expectations onto agricultural land.
Pillar 10: Tenant Farmer Protections
10.1 — The Tenant Squeeze
Approximately one third of farmland in England is farmed by tenant farmers. They do not own the land they work. They rent it from landowners — estates, institutions, investment funds, and private individuals — under tenancy agreements that range from relatively secure Agricultural Holdings Act tenancies to short-term Farm Business Tenancies that can be terminated at relatively short notice.
Tenant farmers are squeezed from both sides. Their rents are rising because land values are being driven up by non-agricultural demand (solar leases, carbon credit schemes, speculative development). Their incomes are falling because farm-gate prices are suppressed by supermarket buying power. They cannot invest in long-term improvements to the land because their tenancy may not last long enough to see a return. And they cannot access the capital to buy land because agricultural land prices are now determined by what a solar company or a pension fund is willing to pay, not what a farmer can afford.
10.2 — Security of Tenure
BUILD will strengthen tenant farmer protections. Farm Business Tenancies will carry a minimum initial term of 10 years, with a right of renewal unless the landlord can demonstrate a genuine, non-speculative reason for repossession. Rent reviews will be linked to agricultural productivity, not to the speculative development value of the land. A landlord cannot raise rent because the land might be worth more as a solar farm or a housing estate — if the land is let for farming, the rent reflects farming value.
Tenant farmers will have a statutory right of first refusal if the landlord decides to sell the land they farm. The sale price must reflect the agricultural value and the sitting tenant’s right, not the hope value of future development permission. This gives the farmer a genuine opportunity to buy the land they have worked, rather than watching it sold over their head to an investor who has never set foot on it.
10.3 — Tenant Access to Subsidies and Investment
Tenant farmers will have full and equal access to all agricultural subsidies, grants, and support programmes administered by the Regional Farmer Alliances. The current system, where some subsidy schemes require landowner consent before a tenant can apply, will be reformed to ensure that the person doing the farming receives the support, regardless of the ownership structure of the land.
Investment in long-term improvements — soil health, drainage, hedgerows, buildings — will be protected by a statutory obligation on the landlord to compensate the tenant for the residual value of improvements if the tenancy ends before the farmer has recovered their investment. A tenant who spends £50,000 improving drainage on a field does not lose that investment because the landlord decides to sell.
Pillar 11: Agricultural Education and the Next Generation
11.1 — The Ageing Crisis
The average age of a British farmer is 59. Young people are not entering farming because the economics do not work, the hours are brutal, the financial risk is enormous, the regulatory burden is crushing, and the social status of farming has been systematically degraded by a culture that tells talented young people to get a degree and a desk job rather than get their hands dirty feeding the nation.
If this trajectory continues, British farming faces a generational cliff. Within 15 to 20 years, a significant proportion of current farmers will retire or die without successors. The land will be sold — not to the next generation of farmers, but to investment funds, solar companies, and developers. The knowledge embedded in those farming families — knowledge of specific soils, microclimates, livestock bloodlines, local ecology, seasonal patterns — will be lost permanently.
11.2 — Farming Apprenticeships
BUILD will establish a national farming apprenticeship programme, administered by the Regional Farmer Alliances, that pays a living wage from day one. Agricultural apprenticeships will carry the same status, structure, and progression pathway as any skilled trade — because farming is a skilled trade. A three-year apprenticeship on a working farm, with integrated classroom training at a local agricultural college, will produce a qualified farmer with practical experience, theoretical knowledge, and a realistic pathway to their own holding.
Apprentices will be placed with experienced farmers in their region through the Alliance, ensuring knowledge transfer is local and relevant. The host farmer will receive a placement payment that fully covers the cost of supervising and training the apprentice — this is not cheap labour, it is structured education.
11.3 — Agricultural Education in Schools
Every child in England should understand where their food comes from. BUILD will introduce food and farming into the national curriculum at primary level — not as a topic within geography or science, but as a subject in its own right. School farms, farm visits, growing programmes, and practical food production will be funded as core educational activity, not as optional extras that disappear when the budget gets tight.
At secondary level, agricultural science will be available as a GCSE and A-level subject with parity of esteem alongside other sciences. The current educational hierarchy that ranks medicine above veterinary science, engineering above agricultural engineering, and laboratory research above field research is a cultural failure that devalues the most essential industry in the country.
11.4 — Dig for Victory Revival
BUILD will launch a modern ‘Dig for Victory’ programme to train communities in home-growing, composting, seed saving, and permaculture. Garden space minimums in all new housing developments will ensure every household has enough land to grow food. Allotment provision will be expanded, with local authorities required to maintain waiting lists of no more than one year — if demand exceeds supply, new allotment land must be identified and provided.
A five-year repair and support guarantee on food-growing tools, because a spade that breaks after one season is not a tool, it’s landfill. The tools that feed families deserve the same durability standards as the machinery that feeds the nation.
Pillar 12: Guaranteed Irrigation — The Water-Food Link
This pillar connects directly to the BUILD UK Water, Environment & National Resilience Charter. The full detail of the water infrastructure programme — desalination, reservoir management, pipe modernisation, rainwater harvesting — is set out in that document. What matters here is the commitment to agriculture:
12.1 — No Farmer Loses a Crop to Drought
British farmers currently compete against international producers who benefit from state-backed irrigation and desalination infrastructure. When drought hits the UK, farmers lose crops while the country increases food imports. We effectively export agricultural jobs because we refuse to invest in water infrastructure.
BUILD’s desalination and reservoir programme will guarantee reliable irrigation supply to British agriculture, independent of weather. Coastal desalination plants powered by offshore wind will keep reservoirs permanently full. Dredged and restored waterways will provide distribution channels. Farmers will have access to irrigation water as a guaranteed resource, not a rationed commodity that disappears every time rainfall drops below average.
12.2 — On-Farm Water Harvesting
BUILD will fund on-farm rainwater harvesting infrastructure — reservoirs, ponds, storage tanks, and collection systems — through the Regional Farmer Alliances. A farm that captures its own rainfall reduces its demand on mains supply, buffers against drought, and creates habitat (farm ponds are one of the most productive wildlife habitats in the agricultural landscape, and most have been filled in over the past 50 years to gain a few extra square metres of field).
On-farm water storage will be treated as agricultural infrastructure and will receive the same planning and subsidy support as other farm buildings. A farmer who wants to dig a pond or install a rainwater collection tank should not need to navigate a six-month planning process. This is farming infrastructure, not a development proposal.
Pillar 13: Zero Tax on Farming Production
The government takes a pound from the farmer, spends 30p administering the process, and gives 70p back as a subsidy. The farmer is 30p worse off and six months older. Nobody benefited except the bureaucracy. BUILD eliminates the loop entirely.
13.1 — The Principle
All income derived from agricultural production — growing food, raising livestock, and selling that produce — is exempt from income tax, corporation tax, and capital gains tax. The farmer keeps what they earn. No tax return on production income. No subsidy application to get their own money back. No six-month wait for a payment from an agency that took the money in the first place. The money stays in the farmer’s pocket from the moment they earn it.
Jeremy Clarkson lost £142,000 on his farm in one year. He could absorb it because he is Jeremy Clarkson. The farmer down the road who lost the same amount went bankrupt because they are not Jeremy Clarkson. Zero tax on production income is the difference between the farm surviving a bad year and the farm being sold to a developer. It is the margin that keeps the lights on, the livestock fed, and the family in the farmhouse.
13.2 — What Is Exempt
Farm production income: all revenue from growing crops, raising livestock, producing dairy, eggs, wool, honey, and any other primary agricultural product. Farm shop sales: direct sale of farm-produced goods to the public. If the farmer grows it or raises it and sells it from the farm, the sale is tax-free. This allows farm shops to price below supermarkets while giving the farmer a better margin than any wholesaler or supermarket buyer ever offered. The consumer gets cheaper food. The farmer gets a better return. The supermarket monopoly weakens.
13.3 — What Is Taxed
Diversification income that is not primary agricultural production is taxed at normal rates. This includes: bed and breakfast accommodation on farm premises; glamping, camping, and holiday let income; festival and event hosting; wedding venues; any commercial activity that uses the farm as a location rather than as a food production facility.
The distinction is simple: if the income comes from growing food or raising animals, it is exempt. If the income comes from using the farm for something other than farming, it is taxed. A farm shop selling the farm’s own produce is exempt. A farm shop selling imported goods it bought from a wholesaler is taxed on the imported goods.
13.4 — Tenant Farmers and Corporate Landlords
The tenant farmer who works the land is not taxed on their production income. The corporation, estate, investment fund, or private landlord that owns the land and collects rent from the tenant farmer is taxed at full rates on that rental income. The person doing the farming keeps everything. The entity collecting rent without farming pays tax on every penny.
This creates the right incentive: farm the land yourself and pay no tax, or own the land without farming it and pay full tax on the rent. The tax system rewards production and penalises passive extraction. A working farmer is better off than a rent-collecting landlord. That is how it should be.
13.5 — Employment Taxes
Employer National Insurance contributions and other employment-related taxes remain payable on farm workers’ wages. These fund worker protections — pensions, sick pay, the NHS — and exempting them would remove protections from the people who need them most. The farmer’s production income is exempt. The farmer’s obligation to their workers is not.
Pillar 14: Riparian Buffers and Natural Filtration
Let the river clean itself. Just stop poisoning it first.
14.1 — Mandatory Riparian Buffer Zones
Every watercourse bordered by farmland will have a mandatory 10-metre riparian buffer strip of natural vegetation between the farmed land and the water. Trees, grass, reeds — whatever is native to the location and appropriate for the soil type. The root systems filter agricultural runoff naturally, absorbing nitrates, phosphates, and sediment before they reach the water.
This costs almost nothing. It works immediately. It is already proven at scale in Scandinavia, where mandatory buffer zones have dramatically reduced agricultural pollution in waterways. A 10-metre strip of natural vegetation along a field edge is not lost farmland — it is functioning infrastructure that protects the river, supports wildlife corridors (connecting hedgerow restoration in the Climate Charter), and prevents the nutrient runoff that causes algal blooms, fish kills, and dead zones downstream.
Buffer zones are funded by the Regional Farmer Alliance, not by the individual farmer. The Alliance establishes the strips, plants them, and maintains them as shared environmental infrastructure. The farmer does not lose income because the subsidy system (Pillar 6) pays for environmental performance — maintaining a buffer zone is farming properly, and proper farming is what the subsidies reward.
14.2 — Constructed Wetlands
Constructed wetlands will be installed at every major field drainage outfall. These are shallow, planted areas where agricultural runoff passes through reed beds before it enters the river. The reeds and their root systems naturally filter nitrates, phosphates, pesticide residues, and sediment from the water. No chemicals. No concrete. No pumps. No energy cost. The wetland does the work.
A constructed wetland doubles as wildlife habitat — reed beds support bitterns, marsh harriers, water voles, dragonflies, and dozens of other species that have been declining as wetland habitat has been drained for agriculture. Every constructed wetland is a water treatment system and a nature reserve. The pollution is filtered. The wildlife recovers. The river receives clean water instead of field drainage loaded with chemicals.
14.3 — Swales, Ditches, and Permeable Bunds
Swales and interception ditches — shallow channels that catch field runoff and slow it down so sediment drops out before reaching the river — will be installed along field edges where drainage flows toward watercourses. These are the same principle as a gutter, but using earth rather than brick. The water slows, the sediment settles, and the cleaner water continues at a pace the river can absorb without flooding.
Permeable bunds — low earth banks along field edges — absorb and filter runoff rather than blocking it. Water passes through the bund slowly, leaving its sediment and nutrient load behind. The bund becomes a natural filter that improves over time as vegetation establishes on and around it.
Combined with riparian buffers and constructed wetlands, these measures create a layered natural filtration system between the field and the river. The runoff passes through the swale, through the bund, through the buffer strip, and through the wetland before it reaches the water. By the time it arrives, it is clean. No chemicals were added. No concrete was poured. No treatment plant was built. The landscape did the work.
14.4 — The Swiss Model: Change What Goes Into the Fields
Switzerland did not build walls along its rivers. It changed what goes into the fields. Phosphate restrictions on agricultural inputs reduced the nutrient load entering Swiss waterways. Direct payments to farmers were tied to environmental performance — not for doing nothing, but for farming properly. The rivers cleaned themselves because the pollution stopped arriving.
BUILD applies the same model. The Farming Charter’s pesticide reforms (Pillar 8) reduce chemical inputs. The subsidy reforms (Pillar 6) tie payments to environmental performance. The riparian buffers, constructed wetlands, and swales filter what remains. The river does not need engineering. It needs space and clean inputs. Give it both and it recovers.
The Circular Model
These fourteen pillars are not isolated policies. They are a single system.
Regional Farmer Alliances replace DEFRA and put decision-making in the hands of working farmers. Shared veterinary services cut costs and provide the capacity for quarantine-and-treat instead of mass culling. Farmland is protected from solar, wind, speculation, and abandonment. Existing solar agreements are reformed so farmers get free energy and fair rent. The Grow British campaign increases domestic production and reconnects consumers with their food. Heritage methods are legalised, local slaughterhouses are reopened, and every animal gets a better life and a better death. Subsidies go to farmers who farm, not landowners who own. Farm machinery is built to last and repairable by the farmer. Chemical regulation is transferred to independent scientists with no industry ties. The right to farm protects working farms from the complaints of people who chose to live next to them. Tenant farmers get security, fair rents, and access to subsidies. The next generation is trained, educated, and given a viable path into the profession. And the water infrastructure programme guarantees irrigation regardless of weather, ending the cycle of drought, crop loss, and import dependency.
Every pillar supports the others. Every investment funds or enables the next. The farmers who feed the nation get the tools, the support, the protection, and the respect they have been denied for decades.
Farmers feed the nation. It is time the nation fed them back.
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BUILD UK
builduk.club
August 2026
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