Is the 2024 weather a bigger threat to long term food security and the future of farming than it is to this next years’ food supply?

It’s nearly the middle of April and 2024 has been a washout. You don’t need to be a farmer to know there’s little that feels normal about the wet weather and I know I’m not alone in feeling like it’s been raining nonstop since Christmas.

Is there a conspiracy at work? Is the weather being manipulated? Is this all part of some concocted grand plan?

Well, in terms of the things we should really be worried about, getting lost in the debate over whether Mother Nature or some malevolent force is behind the growing threat of a failed harvest this summer is the only real rabbit hole there is to fall down.

Hopeful as I am for our struggling farmers, that the weather will turn around and put everything back on track, the sober way to start thinking about issues that should really be concerning anyone looking at the wider U.K. food security and production situation is to question how decision makers will frame what may soon be recognised as the 2024 harvest crisis and how they will then respond.

Of all the food security issues we are facing today, which include but are not limited to deglobalisation, climate change, retail profiteering, political ineptitude and anything that falls under the manufactured problems that need a logic defying solution too, weather should never have been the one problem that has the potential to end up making our fragile food security situation even worse.

The reality that we and our farmers face, is that a failed harvest across in 2024 will play straight into the hands of those who believe and advocate that the U.K. doesn’t need to grow its own food.

There is an unsettling belief at work within the establishment that our food supply can always be guaranteed to come from somewhere abroad, and that new technologies and factory foods – like ground up insects, lab growing and warehouse production – will solve all problems. This mindset results in the fallacious idea that there is little reason to continue pandering to farmers who can only be productive when they are a) told what to grow, and then b) are paid for doing so.

Farmers are being set up to fail

For an essential industry already in crisis and under attack from an establishment that views food security and all of the highly beneficial add ons that U.K. produced food can give British people as trivia they can do without, the ongoing storm is one that couldn’t have landed at a less helpful time.

The real risk to U.K. farmers is that government will make token gestures, but in truth do very little to help the industry in the immediate aftermath.

This is likely to lead to many more business exits for what should really be thriving farming businesses, and a situation arising quickly where the U.K. becomes perilously close to losing the ability to feed itself, even at emergency or wartime levels, using recognisable farming methods that are beneficial for everyone involved in the food chain.

Whilst there is growing unrest among farmers, a belief that the powers that be will eventually step in and save the day still regrettably persists.

It is regrettably fair to say that the misconception that government understands the risks to an already critically vulnerable food supply is easily dismissed when we consider that the equivalent of around only 54% of the food we eat is currently grown in the U.K.

Decision makers either don’t see the risk or they don’t want to see the risk. And whichever it is, the result for U.K. farmers, U.K. food production and U.K. food security is pretty much the same.

U.K. farming, the infrastructure that supports it and the legislation that facilitates it might not be anywhere near able to feed the uk population without help today.

But that doesn’t mean that it cannot. It certainly doesn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t redirect, reform and repurpose where needed, so that U.K. food sovereignty is no longer viewed as being pie in the sky.

The wide range of green, environmental, climate, food quality, nutrition, transparency and other farm and food related issues, that have different activists fighting each other for air would all be resolved by getting behind U.K. farmers and food production to refocus. U.K. agriculture will only be saved by moving away from the Globalist/EU production models to one that puts locality and traditional methods at the centre – albeit in a 21^st century form.

The power for change sits within the hands of our farmers themselves and the trades that align around U.K. agriculture.

Although many still don’t see it this way, it would be wise for anyone and everyone with an interest in being able to grow or eat a regular, sustainable supply of good, healthy and nutritious food to watch carefully what the establishment does and how it responds if the realities of a 2024 harvest crisis begin to unfold.