I spent the past week in the eastern part of Scotland. I met incredible farmers everywhere between Edinburgh and Aberdeenshire.
Curious how financial tools can help de-risk the transition to regenerative agriculture, I found the consensus was that money is rarely the problem, with some nuances related to the ag sector here. Several said, unprompted, that if a change makes financial sense you should borrow the money and do it, and if it doesn’t, nobody else should be paying for it. That came from landowners and tenants alike.
So if the practice pays, what actually needs financing?
According to the farmers I met, there are a few things that could benefit from being financed or subsidized:
Entry. Fencing, water, animals. Small for a farm with stock and equity. Prohibitive for someone starting with neither.
Time. Costs lock in before returns arrive. Rent is fixed, the lease is signed, and you get one attempt a year at lambing, calving or harvest, so a mistake costs a full season before you can try again. One estate owner argued that government could lower the cost of that risk without spending money, by putting a floor under prices or guaranteeing an outcome, because uncertainty is what makes change expensive in the first place.
Accounting. Soil health investment is booked as an expense, so a farm genuinely building an asset shows worse numbers on paper. Regenerative farming is a balance sheet activity, but grants, lending decisions and farm accounts are all P&L instruments. The financial system is structurally blind to what the practice produces.
Land. This was not in my original framing at all, and it may be the most important. Area-based payments keep businesses alive that would otherwise sell, so land rarely comes to market. When it does, forestry can outbid food production, and that conversion is effectively irreversible. Tenancy law has made letting irrational for landowners. Perhaps a few hundred hectares are newly let across all of Scotland in a year. More money won’t fix this.
What was actually working
The instruments that were actually working on these farms were structural rather than financial. Subsidy functioning as rent, so a landless couple could farm without debt. Partnership instead of tenancy. A proposal to rewrite the rules of good husbandry, which still sit in the Agriculture (Scotland) Act 1948, so an outgoing tenant is paid for the soil health they built rather than just the fertiliser they left behind.
These are fresh thoughts from my visits, but each farmer I met deserves a book to describe the innovation and resilience they have built on their land.
Thank you to everyone who welcomed me onto their farm, hosted me in their home, and opened their hearts and sometimes their books.
Next stop: Fields Good in Northern Ireland, then Dublin.
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