What Is the Future of Farming? The Green Deal, Rewilding and the Quiet Transformation of What We Eat

In a recent interview with The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson – former Top Gear presenter turned reluctant Cotswolds farmer – said something that cut through the usual noise about British agriculture: farmers today are "screwed." Not because they lack skills or work ethic, but because the system is being redesigned around them, and nobody is explaining what happens to the food.

Clarkson's Farm, now in its fifth season on Amazon Prime, has done something no policy paper managed: it made millions of people care about what is happening to farms. Clarkson stumbles, loses money, fights bureaucracy, and in doing so accidentally documents the quiet unravelling of British agriculture in real time.

But it is not only a British story. When policymakers speak about rewilding and the Green Deal, they speak of wildlife, wetlands, and biodiversity. Of forests returning to where farms once stood. It sounds beautiful, and in many ways it genuinely matters. But there is a basic question that invariably goes unanswered in these conversations.

If we reclassify fertile land as a 'climate asset': what, precisely, will the next generation eat?

What Is the Green Deal?

Among all the narratives surrounding the Green Deal, there is one that is rarely spoken aloud. Rewilding and 'sustainable land use' programmes are simultaneously a large-scale financial restructuring. And the same logic is playing out across Europe and beyond – not just in Britain.

Land is ceasing to be a productive asset and becoming a climate one. A farmer who once sold wheat now sells carbon sequestration. His buyer is no longer the bakery in the next town – it is an investment fund on the other side of the planet that needs ESG metrics.

The scale is striking. The United Kingdom pays farmers up to £700 per hectare per year to take land out of production, with more than 50,000 hectares already enrolled. In the United States, the Conservation Reserve Program paid $1.8 billion in 2023 for 22.9 million acres taken out of production – though under the Trump administration's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' signed in July 2025, this programme has come under pressure, with Project 2025 explicitly calling to eliminate it, arguing that 'farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land.'

Forgive the directness, but these are not marginal experiments – they are systemic policy. The farmer is no longer the person who grows food. He becomes an ecosystem operator. His role changes fundamentally. Instead of an agronomist, what matters now is a metrics manager: biodiversity, carbon absorption, groundwater levels, pollinator index.

Is that bad in itself? No. But what does it mean in fact? The land that fed people – no longer does.

Farming: The Vanishing Act

The same logic is dismantling farms across the entire European continent. In early 2024, farmers paralysed the capitals of Europe simultaneously. Tractors blocked Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, Athens, Prague, and Madrid. The grievances varied by country – diesel tax breaks in Germany, nitrogen regulations in the Netherlands, Ukrainian grain imports in Poland – but the underlying pressure was the same everywhere: environmental policy is being layered onto an agricultural sector already struggling to survive, with no coherent answer to where the food will come from.

In France, farmers dumped manure at supermarket entrances. In the Netherlands, protests spawned a political party that won 16 senate seats. In Germany, 10,000 tractors rolled into Berlin.

The EU's Green Deal Farm to Fork strategy set targets requiring farmers to halve pesticide use by 2030, reduce fertiliser use by 20%, and rewild significant portions of agricultural land. Under political pressure from the protests, the European Commission began walking back some requirements in 2024, but the structural direction has not changed.

The Netherlands offers the most acute case study. The government has been buying out livestock farmers since 2023 to reduce nitrogen emissions, targeting up to 70% reductions in livestock numbers in some areas. Thousands of farms have closed permanently. The country that is the world's second-largest agricultural exporter per capita is actively dismantling its own farming sector for climate compliance.

In Germany, the phasing out of agricultural diesel subsidies triggered the largest farm protests in decades. The government partially reversed course, but the broader push to reduce farming's carbon footprint continues. In Italy, tractors reached the Colosseum. In Spain and Belgium, similar protests yielded similar temporary concessions.

The pattern is consistent across the EU: political concessions flow after protests, but the structural redesign of land use continues regardless.

The United States: A Different Direction, the Same Fragility

The American trajectory in 2025 cuts the opposite way, and is equally instructive.

Under the Trump administration, with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, signed on July 4, 2025, agricultural policy shifted sharply toward production support. The bill increased commodity subsidies, put pressure on land-retirement programmes, and the administration announced $11 billion in 'Farmer Bridge Payments' to compensate producers hit by trade disruptions. The logic is the inverse of the European Green Deal: rather than paying farmers not to produce, Washington is paying them to keep producing.

The irony is that both approaches share a structural fragility. Europe is offshoring food production while recording the carbon savings locally. America is subsidising production with borrowed money, while climate volatility and input costs make farming less viable by the year. Neither has answered the question of what the food system looks like in 2040.

What Happens to Food When Farms Stop Being Farms: Exporting the Appetite

If a country produces less food, the gap does not disappear. It is filled by imports. And imports follow their own logic.

Freshness travels poorly across oceans. When food must cross an ocean or cover thousands of kilometres by land, it must be stable. Not delicious or nutritious. Predictable and standardized.

A tomato travelling from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom is not the same tomato that grew on a neighbouring farm. It is a different variety, bred for transport, for shelf life, for uniform colour. Its flavour is a by-product. Logistics as the ultimate filter: durability over flavour.

As imports grow, so does processing. Because a processed product withstands transport better. It is stable. It can be warehoused. Its losses in transit are predictable.

We've traded the farmer's field for a carbon sink, and our food for a logistics puzzle.

A rare regional apple variety cannot compete with a standardised Gala, optimised for transport and storage. Local cheese won't make the journey. An old wheat variety holds no interest for global logistics. The biodiversity we so want to restore to nature is simultaneously disappearing from the supermarket aisle. And no one considers this a problem.

What Will Food Look Like in the 2040s?

No science fiction is required – this is an extrapolation of trends already in motion.

If domestic production declines while imports rise, processing becomes the buffer. Tinned goods, frozen food, and ultra-processed products handle long supply chains better. According to NOVA Food Classification data, more than 50% of calories consumed in the United Kingdom already come from ultra-processed products, and approximately 60% in the United States. This share will grow.

According to recent FAO agrifood system assessments (2024/25), the trend of genetic erosion has reached a critical point: while over 90% of traditional crop varieties have vanished from farmers' fields since the early 20th century, a mere nine plant species now provide 66% of all global crop production. The globalisation of food chains continues to accelerate this homogenization, prioritising logistical predictability over biological complexity. As a result, the generation of the 2040s will likely inherit a diet that is 'calorically abundant but sensorially bankrupt' – having access to a greater volume of food while losing the vast spectrum of flavours that defined human nutrition for millennia.

When food arrives through global logistics, it is sold by global brands. This is not a conspiracy: it is simply economies of scale. A local producer cannot compete with a supplier serving 40 countries. The supermarket shelf of 2040 will look roughly the same whether you are in London, Warsaw, or Toronto.

Laboratory-grown meat, fermented proteins, insects – these are already realities, regulated industries with venture investment running into tens of billions of dollars. If farms exit meat production, something else will take their place. The only question is what.

The Question No One Is Answering

When thousands of farmers blocked Brussels with tractors in 2024, they were protesting against a logic that forces them to choose between survival and compliance. In the United Kingdom, a voluntary exit scheme offers a one-time payment to those willing to leave the industry permanently. More than 1,200 farmers have already taken it up.

But these are not just people: each one is a farm that no longer exists, and land that no longer produces.

The United Kingdom already imports around 46% of the food it consumes. Estimates suggest that full implementation of current rewilding programmes could reduce domestic production by a further 15–20%. That means import dependency at 60% or higher.

If we grow food in Brazil instead of Yorkshire – the carbon does not disappear. It simply changes address.

Brazilian beef, raised on cleared forest land, replaces British beef from flood meadows, and someone calls this an environmental victory. Ukrainian wheat, grown with more aggressive agrochemicals, replaces UK wheat, and the carbon balance is recorded in London's favour. Is this ecology or management accounting?

Powerlessness, or Is There a Chance?

None of these problems mean that rewilding is a bad idea. Restoring nature matters. Reducing intensive farming matters. Biodiversity matters.

But there is a difference between a policy that invests in farmers so they produce food better, and a policy that pays them to stop doing so.

Restoring soil health, managing water wisely, embedding biodiversity corridors into active farms – these are compatible strategies.

The tables below show how several European countries define the role of agriculture, and in which of them it is formally considered part of strategic infrastructure.

So can we build a food system in which biodiversity recovers both in the forest and on the shelf? We can. But to do so, we must first acknowledge that these two things are connected.

What We Are Actually Choosing

Anthropologists have long recorded what everyone knows intuitively: food is one of the last living carriers of cultural identity. Language can be forgotten within two generations. Architecture can be demolished. But the taste of food outlives most institutions.

No forecasting is needed here because the projections already exist in academic and government analysis. According to FAO estimates, global food demand will grow by 50% by 2050 relative to 2012 levels. Meanwhile, the area of agricultural land in developed countries is shrinking.

Ultra-processed products already account for around 57% of calories in the British diet and approximately 60% of the American diet (NOVA/BMJ data, 2023). The projected rise by 2035 is to 65–70% in countries with high import dependency.

The alternative protein market, according to the Good Food Institute, will reach $290 billion by 2030. By 2040, conservative estimates suggest it could represent 8 to 22% of the global meat market. These are already regulated industries with approved products on supermarket shelves in Singapore, the United States, and the EU.

The Global Food Security Index records that countries with import dependency above 50% are significantly more vulnerable during periods of geopolitical instability. Following the events of 2022, global wheat prices rose 60% in three months. Egypt, which imports 80% of its wheat, found itself in a structural crisis within weeks.

History offers several cases of countries losing food sovereignty, and what followed was not abstract.

The Irish Famine of 1845–1852. Ireland continued exporting grain to England even at the height of the famine, because the land belonged not to those who worked it, but to those who made decisions about its use. Between one and one and a half million people died. Another million emigrated.

The USSR, 1932–1933. State collectivisation policy destroyed the class of farmers who understood their land. Production collapsed because of the gap between those who made decisions and those who knew how the land worked. The result was a famine that claimed between three and seven million lives.

No one is comparing rewilding to these catastrophes. But in both cases, the same pattern preceded the collapse: land policy was designed by people who had never depended on its harvest.

It is important to call things by their right names, and this is not chance, it is choice. When a society decides to reclassify land from 'the place where food grows' to 'a climate asset', it is making a bet. A bet that global supply chains will function without interruption. That geopolitics will not intervene. That what cannot be grown here can always be bought there.

This is a reasonable bet in a stable world. But we do not live in a stable world.

There is one observation from systems theory that is rarely applied to food: the more efficiently a system is optimised for one scenario, the more fragile it becomes in any other. The global food chain is phenomenally efficient. And phenomenally fragile.

The question remains open: do we understand what we are choosing? Because a choice made without understanding its consequences is hope. And hope, it should be noted, was the last thing to crawl out of Pandora's box. After all the disasters. Perhaps that is precisely why it ended up there, as a consolation for those who had not thought clearly enough beforehand.

Hope is a poor agricultural strategy.