Defining and delivering ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the UK after Brexit: interdisciplinary lessons from experiences of agricultural reform

ABSTRACT

Defining and achieving sustainability in the context of complex, multi-scale, and constantly changing agricultural systems is a challenge for research and policy. In UK agriculture, the European Union and its Common Agricultural Policy has been a key source of funding for and approaches to sustainability in the agriculture and rural development sectors. The decision to leave the European Union represents a significant moment in UK agriculture and rural development policy, and both an opportunity and responsibility for the UK government to set out and commit towards achieving sustainability goals for the sector. In this study, a combination of ethnographic case study research, focusing on the case of upland farmers in the Yorkshire Dales, policy analysis and national agricultural sector data is referred to in describing experiences of agricultural policy reform over recent decades. From these experiences, lessons for the design and delivery of future agriculture and rural development are drawn out. It is argued that the integrated assessment of multiple sources of knowledge can provide a means to critically reflecting on evidence about sustainability in complex systems, better understanding trade-offs, and creating a more complete and inclusive knowledge base from which to define sustainable agriculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural systems
• sustainability
• UK agriculture
• interdisciplinarity
• Brexit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stephen Whitfield http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3040-778X

Notes

1 Demonstrated by the opposing positions taken by DEFRA Secretary of State Liz Truss and Farming Minister George Eustice

2 A survey published in Farmers Weekly on 29th April 2016 suggested that 58% of farmers intended to vote ‘leave’ and 31% ‘remain’