Technological efficiency push could drive farmers out of business, warns ag expert

Emily Norton, a dairy and arable farmer and head of rural research at Savills consultancy, said there was a danger the human element of farming was being ignored by policy makers and the wider supply chain, who are focused heavily on the need to increase efficiency.

Her comments, at the Financial Times Global Food Systems Summit in London on November 19, followed a call from Wheatsheaf Group chief executive Graham Ramsbottom for investors in plant-based food innovations to consider how the 1.2 billion people employed in the livestock industry worldwide would be affected by a large-scale change in diets.

She said: “[We] really [need to think] about the social impact of what we are doing and how we actually value rural communities and the human influence on farming.

“When you say 1.5 billion people are involved in this as an industry, and technology is innovating their existences away, as a society, we need to decide what it is we are really trying to create.

“If our sole motivation is feeding people efficiently, this is inevitable. Efficiency will drive all of this away and we will lose the human influence on farming and have an increasing disparity between what we do as humans in our day-to-day lives and producing food.”