Farmland should be rewilded even at the cost of food production.

Wildlife is in steep decline. Across the UK, the species studied have declined in abundance by 19% on average since 1970, and nearly 1 in 6 species are threatened with extinction from Great Britain. Farmland covers 69% of UK land, so nature cannot recover at the scale needed without some of it. Field margins and hedgerows help; however, restoring habitats such as bog, wetland, scrub, and woodland across whole landscapes means letting some land stop being farmed. (State of Nature Partnership, 2023; Defra, 2026a)

Land is central to reaching net zero. Agriculture produced 12% of the UK's net greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, and peatland is the largest source of emissions from land use. Rewetting drained peat and letting woodland return stop those emissions and store carbon instead. The government's own Land Use Framework estimates that around 788,000 hectares in England, about 9% of its farmland, may need to move to climate and nature uses by 2050. (DESNZ, 2026; Defra, 2026c)

Much farmland produces relatively little food. About 85% of the UK's farmland was used for animal feed or livestock in 2023. Worldwide, meat, dairy, eggs, and farmed fish use about 83% of farmland but provide only 18% of calories. In other words, a large share of farmland goes to producing a small share of the food people eat. The government already plans to steer nature recovery towards less productive land and away from the best farmland. Accepting a modest fall in output from that land is a reasonable price for wild places that would otherwise never return. (Defra, 2026c; Poore and Nemecek, 2018)

Benefits reach well beyond wildlife. Restored peatland and wetland store carbon and reduce the risk of flooding and wildfire, according to the Land Use Framework, which also plans to move intensive farming back from riverbanks to help clean up rivers. This matters because 1 in 4 homes in England are projected to be at risk from flooding by 2050. These are public goods that food markets do not pay for, and giving land back to nature is one of the few ways to provide them at scale. (Defra, 2026c)

Food security matters more in an unstable world. In 2025, UK farms produced food worth about 60% of what the country consumed, down from 65% the year before. The National Audit Office (NAO) reported in 2026 that climate change is making extreme weather more likely, and that food price inflation peaked at 19.2% in March 2023 because of global conditions and conflict. Taking farmland out of production would leave the UK more dependent on imports at a time when supply chains are under growing strain. (Defra, 2026b; NAO, 2026)

Rewilding here can mean more damage elsewhere. People do not eat less because the UK farms less; the food is simply grown somewhere else. An analysis published in Science in 2025 estimated that returning typical UK cropland to nature could do about 5 times more harm to global biodiversity than it brings to local wildlife, because the lost wheat, barley, and oilseed rape would be grown in other countries. In effect, the UK would be exporting its nature loss to places with weaker protections. (Balmford et al, 2025)

Nature can recover alongside farming. The government's Land Use Framework found that England has enough land to meet its nature and climate targets without reducing domestic food production, provided farming becomes more productive. Most of the changes it describes, such as field margins, hedgerows, and trees on farms, help wildlife whilst the land keeps producing food. This brings nature back to the places where people live and work, and avoids sacrificing food output that may be badly needed later. (Defra, 2026c)

Farms and their skills are hard to rebuild. Farms are businesses and communities as well as land, and the agri-food sector supported 4.1 million jobs across Great Britain in 2025. Once a farm is rewilded, the skills, buildings, and local trade that supported it are difficult to bring back if food is needed in future. The National Farmers' Union (NFU) has also warned that more extreme weather may cause yields to fall rather than rise, which would make every productive field more valuable. (NAO, 2026; Defra, 2026c)