ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in more detail the changes to farming practice that will be required to contribute to the UK’s net zero objective. Given the anticipated shift from farmland to forestry and energy crops, current levels of food production may be required to be delivered from significantly less land. This challenge is leading to a bifurcated debate about so-called sustainable intensification, on the one hand, which sees the solution in the adoption of ever-more sophisticated technology and precision farming techniques, and agro-ecology or high-nature-value farming, on the other, which is a more ecological approach rooted in appreciation of environmental processes and constraints. This debate reproduces ideas that have featured in the struggles between farming and environmental interests for the past half-century, including between land-sparing and land-sharing approaches to conservation. The chapter maps out the main arguments and the institutions and networks that seek to advance them.
