"Growing England's Future" is a blueprint for more factory farming

When Defra published Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England's Future in June, the reaction was almost uniformly warm. The NFU welcomed the direction but wanted the money to match it. Sustain welcomed it and pushed for more agroecology. The horticulture lobby welcomed it and asked for the detail. Everyone found something to like.

What nobody said out loud is the thing that matters most to us: on the biggest question in farming, the industrial-scale confinement of animals, the roadmap doesn't just look away. It plans to build more of it.

The government knows the problem. It says so in black and white.

You don't have to take our word for how damaging intensive animal agriculture is. The roadmap says it.

It concedes that agriculture is now the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, and the single largest contributor to water pollution. It admits farming is responsible for around 89% of the UK's ammonia emissions and, in one strikingly candid line, that cattle farming alone contributes roughly half of all the ammonia and greenhouse gases coming out of agriculture.

It goes further. It accepts that poor animal welfare is itself a pollution problem that, in its own words, stressed and unhealthy animals may produce more methane. This is the government conceding, in a flagship strategy, that the way we treat farmed animals and the damage farming does to the planet are the same problem.

So what does a plan that understands all this actually propose to do about the animals at the centre of it?

It ignores the advice it paid for.

Four months before this roadmap, the government's own statutory climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee, told it exactly what a credible farming plan needs to include. In its Seventh Carbon Budget, the CCC set out that average meat consumption should fall by around a quarter by 2040 and by over a third by 2050, and that cattle and sheep numbers need to drop by more than a quarter by 2040 freeing up land for nature and cutting the emissions that farming can't otherwise shift.

The Farming Roadmap contains none of this. There is no meat-reduction target. No herd-reduction target. No mention of the dietary shift the CCC says is unavoidable. The single lever the government's own advisers identified as essential has simply been left out.

The roadmap does address the awkward fact of livestock emissions but only through technology. It promises funding for "selective breeding, methane suppressing feed products and novel grazing regimes." In other words: keep the same number of animals in the same system, and try to engineer the emissions down at the margins. It's the agricultural equivalent of tackling a flood by inventing a better bucket.

And where the roadmap gets closest to the demand question, it reaches for a reassuring line to avoid it noting that meat consumption in richer countries is "stabilising," as if a plateau at a historically high level were the same as a solution.

The tell: this isn't neutral on factory farming. It wants more of it.

Here is where the roadmap gives itself away. It is not simply silent on intensive livestock. It is actively committed to expanding output.

Its stated ambition is that by 2050 England will have "maintained, and in some key sectors increased, overall food production," and that "all farming sectors will see growth." It's explicit that this "will require production expanding for some farming businesses and in some farming sub-sectors."

And which sub-sector did the government pick to go first? Of the very first two Sector Growth Plans it is drawing up with industry, one is horticulture and the other is poultry, including eggs.

Poultry is the most intensively farmed sector in Britain. Our own, soon to be released, mapping of the APHA poultry register puts more than 168 million birds on English farms, concentrated in a relatively small number of parishes where the sheds cluster along the same rivers the roadmap admits are already polluted. This is the sector the government has chosen to accelerate. "Growing England's Future," it turns out, means growing the broiler shed.

The roadmap even nods, in passing, to the disease risk this creates launching new "Poultry Biosecurity Reviews" in the same breath as the growth plan. Pack more birds into more sheds, and the bird-flu problem the government is quietly bracing for gets worse, not better. It is planning for the consequences of intensification while planning the intensification.

They know it's dirty. They admit it in the small print.

The clearest proof that ministers understand exactly what they're growing is buried in the water-pollution section. There, the roadmap commits to consulting on extending environmental permitting to intensive dairy and beef and says plainly that this "builds on the environmental improvements delivered through permitting of large intensive pig and poultry farms."

Read that again. The government is citing the pollution controls already slapped on intensive pig and poultry units as a model worth copying - a tacit admission that the intensive model is dirty enough to need permitting like a factory. And in the same document, it names poultry as its number-one growth priority. It wants to expand the very system it's simultaneously trying to fence in with pollution permits.

What a real roadmap would say.

None of this is an argument against farming, or against farmers. British farmers have been handed a decade of upheaval and deserve the stability this roadmap promises. The problem isn't farming. It's factory farming, the specific, industrial model of cramming ever more animals into ever fewer places, and calling the resulting emissions, pollution and suffering a productivity success story.

A roadmap that was honest about its own evidence would back fewer, better-farmed animals, not more intensive ones. It would take the CCC's advice seriously instead of quietly shelving it. It would treat the growth of the poultry and intensive livestock sectors as a risk to manage, not a target to hit. And it would offer farmers a genuine, funded transition away from the intensive model, the one the government's own air-quality, water and climate figures show is failing.

Instead, we've been handed a 25-year plan that reads the diagnosis correctly and then prescribes more of the disease.

The Green Britain Foundation campaigns to end factory farming. If the government's vision of England's future is more intensive sheds, we intend to be the ones asking, loudly, who exactly that future is for.