Brexit: How might UK Agriculture Survive or Thrive?

The UK agri food system will be one of the sectors most seriously affected by Brexit. Trade both within and beyond the European Union is extremely important to the industry and agricultural producers are also heavily dependent upon seasonal migrant labour. At the moment farming is both highly regulated and subsidised under the Common Agricultural Policy. For these reasons our exit from the EU will shake up the whole system, and the effects will reach far beyond farming. How agricultural policy is formulated in the wake of such enormous change has implications for the livelihoods of large numbers of people and, more widely, for the whole of the UK, including the shopper in their local supermarket.

This project aims to bring together information across a wide range of different areas: imports, exports, supply, demand, prices, to consider the potential implications. The researchers will investigate the interactions of these factors and the potential consequences of different policy scenarios. They aim to find out what the potential real effects could be for farming families: how resilient will their incomes be, how will their production decision making be affected, and what are the implications for UK agri-trade across the industry as a whole, for rural communities and for the consumer?

In order to achieve this, the project will use a new approach that brings together different areas of expertise in agricultural and farm business economics, policy analysis and international trade. It uses a unique combination of models across these different disciplines to investigate possible outcomes from potential policy scenarios. The researchers will combine information from these different sources to better understand how trade and macroeconomic relationships are influenced by the way in which the agricultural sector is organised and performs. In a time of such profound change, these insights will help policymakers and the industry understand how UK agriculture and the wider agri-food system can not only survive but be helped to thrive.

The project will target two main audiences with updates and key research results:
Policymakers (e.g. Defra, MPs and devolved administrations) will be an important audience for implications of the policy scenarios.
Practitioner organisations, such as Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), National Farmers Union (NFU), Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICs), the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), and the whole range of specialist professional organisations for land-based advisors and agri-trade will be important for their input during the research process and this will also be a key means of engaging with them and help to ensure their interest and willingness to take research results on board.

Dissemination is a key part of the project, right from publicising the scope of the project, to generating interest and engagement from various stakeholders, to subsequent exploitation of results and impact. Hence dissemination will go hand-in-hand with the co-production of knowledge which will last for the entire duration of the project. Communication channels will be tailored to specific audiences:

Established networks (e.g. Landbridge which engages with land advisors) will play a major role and we also have good relationships with other networks such as RuSource.

Postal, email and on line communication will all be used. There will be targeted postal and email communication to MPs, peers and civil servants on our existing database of over 1500 recipients as appropriate.
We will communicate our research results to other key resource communicators, in particular the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and the House of Commons Library.As well as a well-planned communications plan we aim to make opportunistic responses to any relevant enquiries and consultations that may arise during the research process.

We will be employing some carefully chose communication tools:
1) Two briefing notes for target audience both produced in print and electronic media: Policy note for policymakers and Practice note for industry organisations. Briefing notes will identify key findings from the research for each audience and be written in accessible, non-academic language, with recommendations for action under specific scenarios. Writing and production of these will draw upon our proven skills and experience in this area, i.e. the highly regarded Policy and Practice Note series from the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (41 notes) and the Living With Environmental Change series (36 notes) that built upon this were edited and produced by CRE staff. The notes will be developed in consultation with stakeholders and the final products will be used in final workshop with target audiences. 2) Personal briefing(s) for Defra officials will be offered via existing networks and these will be supported using the written materials.

Media engagement: Alongside the academic outputs from the project, mainstream and, in particular, trade media (e.g. Farmers' Weekly, Farmers' Guardian, NFU, RICs, Land Journal and other professional publications, plus potential broadcast opportunities such as BBC's Farming Today) and also specialist networks e.g. RuSource will be targeted where appropriate. We will draw upon our existing contacts with journalists and aim to create new ones following the training offered by the ESRC-funded one-day senior media training course to be held in London to the PI (if the project is successful). We have considerable experience in writing for the media within the Centre for Rural Economy (CRE) at Newcastle University.

Information will be made available on line using the existing Landbridge website which exists to bring together academics and land based professionals, and also via the Relu newsletter and Relu Twitter feeds which are operated in association with Landbridge, but also to the project own website and CRE website.