The Farming Profitability Review and the Active Farmer

The Farming Profitability Review by Baroness Minette Batters was published on 18 December 2025.  At 154 pages, including appendices, it’s a chunky piece of work.  

The Review provides 57 separate Recommendations for action.  With this amount of effort going into it, the Review is well worth reading, and a link to the full Review is here:   farming-profitability-review.pdf

This is one of a number of articles looking at particular Recommendations from the Review that catch the eye:

Recommendation 6: Defra to apply the ‘Active Farmer Principle’ to schemes in the Farming Budget to ensure funding is only going to farmers, rather than landowners or developers.

Farming Profitability Review – M Batters, 2025

The idea of this seems to make some sense, with the principle that government scheme payments should be made only to farmers, but it does depend upon who is seen as a farmer.  The suggested definition in the Review is that to qualify for schemes, a farmer would have to satisfy all of these criteria:

• Undertake agricultural or ancillary activities (including conservation schemes) on agricultural land.

• Have at least three hectares of eligible agricultural land in England or be able to demonstrate more than 550 standard labour hours (presumably spent on agriculture/ancillary activities).

• Have exclusive occupation and management control of the land for at least 10 months of the calendar year.

This is intended to restrict the benefit of grants to those who are seen as active farmers, rather than being non-farmers, and in particular to avoid support payments being made to two particular groups identified by the Review itself, landowners or developers.  The focus on landowners and developers is presumably on those who are perceived to have absolutely nothing to do with farming, rather than those who have a foot in both camps.

But in a fluid world, where farming is one of a number of activities carried out on land, does this create more problems than it solves? 

In particular, does this add a negative incentive for those (including landowners and developers) who might otherwise let land away from themselves to tenant farmers, and instead encourage them to retain the land under their control, so that they satisfy the active farmer criteria?  That might lead to greater use of contracting arrangements by landowners. 

Anecdotal discussions suggest that an increasing number of landowners are already considering keeping land in hand and farming it through contracting agreements, giving the potential flexibility that may be required to enter into environmental or other projects that will use that land.

While obviously not being the intended outcome, a shift in that direction might hurt groups that the Review otherwise wants to support, namely tenant farmers, who might be deprived of access to long-term tenancy agreements because more land becomes subject to contracting or similar agreements, and new entrants.  

The potential issues around the Active Farmer Principle highlight the trade-offs that can come if steps are taken to limit support to particular groups, which in turn can produce unintended incentives for others to act in a particular way.