At the dawn of a new administration, as we welcome a new government and ministers, the UK Food Valley has been swift in taking the opportunity to make the case for continued growth in the agriculture and food sector.

We are passionate in our belief that our industry has a bright future and that with the right conditions it can continue to grow strongly.  

Investment in our local sector is accelerating and now running at £1 billion per annum with future growth of the agri-food sector a key focus for our draft Devolution Deal.

We have enabled growth by adopting a pro-growth, industry-led investment agenda. The public and academic sector have explicitly adopted an enabling strategy, working collaboratively in conjunction with industry with a ‘triple helix’ model to deliver success by attracting and supporting investors. This includes addressing infrastructure needs such as water and energy and aligning agri-food sector growth with digital and transport infrastructure improvements.

We also need to ensure we are focusing on customer needs, with our Food Board debating market trends which are important to our major customers, including how our food chain carbon footprints can be reduced. We are connected to UK retailers and have regular dialogue, opening new opportunities for our supply chains and are focusing on how we can drive and impact innovation in food toward net zero as well as supporting retailers’ carbon credit goals. We are adding real value to supply chains in food. To build on this, in September I am leading a delegation of food businesses to London to meet with politicians and one of our major supermarkets, and we will report on this in the next UKFV Bulletin.

Our aim is to be a Top 10 Global Cluster in agri-food and in some parts of our sector, such as the fish processing sector and fresh produce in south Lincolnshire, we are close to achieving this, which is why we are building on these clusters and using them to attract more investment to the area. Despite the significant increase in investment we have seen, we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that by working together locally and with government, we can attract even more investment, innovation, job growth and food security. To this end, we have identified five areas on which we want to work with the new government:

  1. A National Food Sector Growth Plan. We have been making the case for agri-food sector growth and ensuring that potential investors, from local businesses to large global food companies, know about our ambition. The aim is to give investors the confidence to invest, safe in the knowledge that we will continue to support them. This approach needs to be adopted nationally and we look forward to working with government to develop and deliver a pro-growth agenda for the food chain.
  2. Productivity-Led Investment.  We have focused on productivity-led growth, with the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) set up to address the need to embrace automation, robotics, and digitalisation to revolutionise productivity.  An industry-led focus is addressing real industry problems in partnership, but we need to do more to be able to complete our mission to transform productivity in a food production sector that employs 75,000 workers in Greater Lincolnshire and over 1.1 million across the UK.
  3. Delivery of Environmental Progress. The food chain has ambitious targets for carbon reduction, water footprints, and biodiversity. It also has to address the impacts of climate change, in particular more extreme weather events, something which is in sharp focus today after a record-breaking wet winter in 2023/24 coming hard on the heels of a 1-in-500-year drought event across Europe in 2022. Our focus will remain on delivering carbon reductions per unit of production and not, as some advocate, by reducing UK production which has the unintended consequence of exporting the environmental impact along with the jobs this supports. We will continue to focus on technology to address this, meet the challenges of climate change, and reduce our footprint per unit of food consumed, at the same time as growing the economy.
  4. Growing the Supply of Naturally Healthy Foods.  We are the national leader in the horticulture and fish sectors, with a rapidly growing plant protein industry. We aim to continue to lead on these areas, which have the potential to align industry investment with healthy food choices and to attract oversea investment in sectors which are heavily dependent on imports.
  5. Delivery of Social Progress.  Our food industry will need a growing workforce and must address the challenges it has had in recent decades in attracting UK workers, allowing it to reduce the need for migrant workers. We recognise that the key to doing this is to make food chain careers more attractive through flexible working and better wages and conditions. In a globally competitive sector this can only be achieved through productivity growth, and so we will double down on our commitment to upskill the workforce and to the use of technology to support more productive roles, which in turn can deliver higher paid jobs. 

We also think there are some exciting opportunities for cross-sectoral working, including linking to other priority sectors for the Greater Lincolnshire economy, such as energy, engineering and defence. The agriculture and food sector is both dependent on the supply of energy and has to be at the forefront of the energy transition so that we can deliver the low-carbon food chains the industry is committed to. In engineering and defence, we are seeing a similar focus on automation, sensing and control technologies being developed and it is important we look for the synergies this provides in enabling technologies which can be applied to multiple sectors.

In the UK Food Valley, we are always keen to work with others, whether in other parts of the UK, in government or in other sectors, and if you have further ideas about where we could work together to drive positive change in the industry, please do reach out to us. We will continue to promote the UK Food Valley with vigour, but the more partners we have the more impact we can achieve, and we want to work with as many businesses as possible to drive this step change in the future.

Sarah Louise Fairburn