From Diddly Squat to geopolitics: Why food security needs new thinking

Jeremy Clarkson has spent five seasons learning what farmers have known for generations: you can do everything right and still lose. Too much rain. Not enough rain. The wrong conditions at exactly the wrong moment. A crop that simply doesn’t deliver. What makes the latest series compelling is that Clarkson doesn’t just absorb the setbacks – he goes looking for answers, deploying new technology, equipment, and approaches in an attempt to make the farm more productive and secure. 

And yet, season after season, the farm remains exposed to forces entirely beyond its control. That should give us pause. If a farmer with capital, curiosity and a genuine willingness to experiment still can’t guarantee a harvest, it tells us something uncomfortable about the resilience of the system as a whole, because most farms have far less room to absorb a bad year than Diddly Squat does. 

The summer that settled the argument

The 2026 growing season has been a hard lesson in what climate volatility actually does to food production. Prolonged dry conditions, extreme heat and wildfires have combined to put agriculture under acute stress. Farmers have brought in harvests weeks early, knowing the yields will be well below expectations. Crop quality has suffered, irrigation and livestock water demand have climbed, and reservoir levels in parts of the country have fallen to exceptionally low levels. 

Lower income, higher costs and no rain in the forecast is a difficult combination in any single year; it becomes an existential one when it repeats. And it is repeating. This is the third drought in 5 years, which is the detail that should reframe the entire discussion. Climate risk in UK agriculture has stopped being an anomaly to be weathered and started being a pattern to be planned for; an operating condition rather than a projection. 

The UK government has responded to that shift. In mid-August 2026, the Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced £65m in support for drought-hit farmers, with £50m routed through the Sustainable Farming Incentive and prioritised towards areas of greatest need, £15m towards on-farm reservoirs, and a set of practical flexibilities covering grazing, cutting and the speed at which water abstraction licences are granted. Nine new reservoir developments received backing. 

The framing mattered as much as the money: farmers, the argument went, shouldn’t be left carrying the risk of a changing climate alone, and the ability to grow our own food is a matter of national security that ought to be treated as such. That is a meaningful shift, moving food production out of the agricultural policy box and into the national resilience box, where it arguably belongs. 

The response from industry added an important qualification. The Country Land and Business Association welcomed the package as pragmatic but described it as a temporary fix, noting that the £15m for reservoirs is reallocated rather than new money and will fund only a fraction of what the Association argues is required, with the overwhelming bulk of the cost still falling on farmers who are already absorbing record input costs and new tax burdens. Both assessments can be true at once. The intervention is genuinely useful, but it doesn’t, on its own, close the gap. The space between those two facts is where the interesting policy question lies: how do we make the food system structurally more resilient, rather than responding to each shock as it arrives? 

That question becomes sharper still when you widen the frame, because drought is only one of the pressures currently bearing down on UK food production. Geopolitical disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has thrown fertiliser supply and global trade routes into sharp relief, with government warning that continued instability could feed through into agricultural inputs and food prices. And from 1 January 2027, the UK Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will levy a charge on importers for the carbon emitted in the production of certain goods. The sector estimates this could add £50 a tonne or more to imported fertiliser, a cost that farmers will largely bear. 

Energy costs, shipping capacity and trade constraints all shape what it costs to grow food in Britain, and none of them is within a farmer’s control. Environmental and geopolitical shocks are very different in origin, but they share a defining characteristic: both originate outside the sector, both transmit rapidly to yields, costs, and availability, and both are becoming more frequent rather than less. We now need to look beyond whether disruption will arrive, and home in on how much room for manœuvre we have when it does.

Not how much we produce, but in how many ways

Food security is usually framed around output: how much we produce, how much land we farm, how efficiently we farm it. It’s a reasonable starting point, but on its own, is incomplete because it measures how the system performs in normal conditions rather than how it behaves under stress. A more useful framing might be to look at how many different ways we can produce these outputs. 

That reframing matters because efficiency and resilience are not the same property, and optimising hard for one can quietly erode the other. A highly efficient system tends to be a tightly connected one, with little spare capacity, concentrated supply chains and small margins for error, which is exactly what makes it perform well in stable conditions and fail sharply when one part of it gives way. Resilience works differently. It comes from variety and backup: multiple crops, multiple ingredients, multiple processes, multiple input routes, and multiple production models, so that a failure in one part of the system doesn’t propagate through the whole system. That is a less elegant system on paper, and a considerably more robust one in practice. 

None of this is an argument for replacing farming. Farmers are, and will remain, foundational to the UK food system, and no realistic scenario changes that. This is an argument against depending on a single production model, a narrow set of supply chains, or the increasingly shaky assumption that growing conditions will stay within their historical range. Much of the response can come from farming itself: biological approaches to crop health that reduce reliance on synthetic inputs; varieties bred for drier summers; soil biology and microbiome sciences that improve water retention and resilience, alongside production methods that sit outside the field entirely. If the climate is going to move, the system needs more than one way to respond. 

This is where the next generation of food technologies earns a place in the conversation rather than being treated as a novelty. Engineering biology, precision fermentation, biomass fermentation and cell culture offer genuinely different routes to food and food ingredients; routes that can be substantially less dependent on the weather, land availability, seasonal timing or imported agricultural inputs. In a system simultaneously exposed to drought and to trade disruption, that degree of independence has real strategic value, not because these technologies displace conventional agriculture, but because they sit alongside it and provide alternative pathways for some of the most climate-sensitive or import-dependent parts of the supply chain. Having more than one way to produce food is, in this sense, a form of insurance for the country. 

The gap between invention and industry

There’s a hard caveat attached to all of that, however, and it’s the one the UK has historically been slow at addressing. Innovation only creates resilience if it can be made at scale. 

Britain is exceptionally good at generating ideas and less good at industrialising them, and in food, that gap is particularly punishing. A process that performs beautifully in a lab faces an entirely different set of problems at pilot and commercial scale: process control, batch-to-batch consistency, downstream processing, formulation, food safety, regulatory approval and, ultimately, whether the costs stack up against incumbent products with decades of manufacturing optimisation behind them. 

Each of those challenges is solvable, but only through engineering and iteration at increasing scale, not through further lab research. This is where promising technologies stall: not at the point of discovery, but at the point of manufacture, which is also the only point at which they start contributing anything to food security at all. 

That is the gap CPI’s Novel Food Innovation Centre is built to close. Expanded food-grade pilot capability, including pilot-scale bioprocessing and downstream processing, allows organisations developing next-generation foods and ingredients to progress from lab development towards manufacturing readiness, demonstrating not only that a process works, but also that it can be run repeatedly, safely, consistently and economically at a volume that matters commercially. That distinction is what matters most, because a resilient food system can’t be built at lab scale, however good the science underpinning it. 

Seen this way, there’s a common thread running from the drought response straight through to the scale-up challenge. Farmers need reservoirs, water infrastructure and abstraction rules (the licences governing how much water can be taken, and when) that function under stress. Innovators need pilot plants, regulatory pathways and routes to manufacture. In both cases, resilience turns out to be a function of infrastructure – physical, industrial and institutional – and that infrastructure has to be built in advance of the shock rather than funded in response to it. 

The £65m announcement is significant, less for its scale than for what it establishes: climate risk is now a strategic food issue, and the state has a legitimate role in underwriting it. The logical extension is a sustained programme of investment in productive capacity, with planning, abstraction and manufacturing capability aligned behind it, rather than a reliance on emergency packages alone. 

From efficiency to options

The lesson from Diddly Squat is that technology can sharpen decisions, improve efficiency and help farmers adapt, but it can’t insulate a field from the sky above it. No amount of innovation within a single production model can remove that model’s fundamental exposure, and that’s precisely why the goal can’t be to make a single system more efficient. It has to be about developing more ways to produce food: new ingredients, new processes, new applications of biology, and new routes from raw materials to finished products, operating alongside and in support of conventional agriculture rather than in competition with it. 

None of that will be delivered by a single technology, a single farm or a single organisation. It requires farmers, food producers, innovators, manufacturers, investors, and policymakers to pull in the same direction over a longer time horizon than a single political cycle. But more than anything, it requires a shift in how we think about the problem: food security is about building more ways to produce food, not just producing more of it, and ensuring those alternatives can operate at the scale the country needs. 

If the UK is to withstand the next drought, the next supply-chain shock or the next global disruption, we need to focus on converting today’s promising science into tomorrow’s manufacturing capability. Because the future of food may depend not only on what we grow in the field, but on what we learn to make, scale and produce in new ways.