As climate change accelerates, food production is undergoing radical transformation. Droughts devastating UK harvests were in the news this week. New technologies are disrupting traditional systems.

Could Galbraith’s Commercial team eventually be responsible for more food production than its Rural team? The future of food is likely to be shaped less by the land itself: yet both food and land present huge business opportunities for those ready to grasp them.

Climate disruption is the new normal

While it is tempting to hope things might go back to normal soon, in a world of climate change, the sobering fact is that every new ‘hottest year on record’ we experience now will be remembered in future as part of a cooler, more stable past.

More and more economists, technologists and investors believe we are facing a shift in food production as big as the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

The right food in the right place New research published in Nature shows that arable crops produced in Canada have far lower carbon emissions than those produced in Australia or Europe – far outweighing the carbon emissions of transporting the commodities from Canada to those countries.

The study shows how differences of production efficiency can far outweigh the contribution of transport in carbon footprint, even over large distances. Producing 'the right food in the right place' could be more effective than aiming for a holistic local diet.

Farming upwards not outwards

Land is becoming precious: very precious. New York began building upwards not outwards in the 1880s; here in Edinburgh we pre-empted their skyscrapers with our tenements two hundred years before. Now, with a human need to feed 8 billion people, and a planetary need to sustain resilient ecosystems, could food production learn the same lesson?

In 2021, I visited the James Hutton Institute’s demonstration vertical farm to see how vegetables can be grown in their own skyscrapers under precisely controlled conditions. The headlines about the UK’s vegetable supply suffering the ravages of climate change reminded me of these indoor crops. Since then, investment in vertical farming in Scotland has escalated. SRUC, Scotland’s rural college, opened its own commercial-scale vertical farm in Edinburgh earlier this year, providing a training and research facility.

Vertical farming provides a complementary approach to the Canadian example above. Rather than spreading out on land where environmental conditions are best, food can be grown as close as possible to the customers, and where energy, water, transport and waste infrastructure are best developed. Could the fresh vegetable section of your supermarket be supplied in future from a vertical farm on its roof, picked and delivered within minutes?

Fish out of water

Meanwhile, a more radical, and much bigger, food solution is breaking into the mix. Food systems expert Paul Gilding argues in a new paper that big industrial commodity farming (intensive beef and dairy, broadacre soy and corn, palm oil, seafood production) is showing signs of collapse under ecological limits, while local and traditional farming systems cannot approach volume of food required to feed the world’s cities.

Gilding’s paper introduces new technologies producing key commodities like palm oil, cheese and fish, in particular precision fermentation. These are improving exponentially, as are the technologies such as AI and renewable energy on which they rely. Gilding forecasts these will become mainstream within ten years, and the food system will see a transition similar to the energy transition's shift to renewables.

What does this mean for land management?

In this transforming world, traditional land managers have an increasingly crucial role combining regenerative ecosystem management with producing the top-quality resources that cannot be produced another way. In Scotland and northern England, regenerative production of products like pasture-fed beef, free-range eggs, lamb, game, and sustainable timber, have crucial roles to play in nutrition, conservation, the low-carbon economy, quality of life, and culture.

In land management, these multiple objectives – production of food and materials, and ecological restoration – can no longer be approached singly, or prioritised above one another. We don’t have enough land, as recent research from Royal Agricultural University shows. Combining them will require building on the skills already within the rurul economy, with investment from public or private sources.

We’re ready for this. For many years, the Galbraith rural, agricultural, and commercial teams have worked closely together in person, along with renewable energy, building consultancy, forestry, and other specialist teams, to access the advice and funding required to enable rural businesses to flourish in a changing world. It’s no accident that our core values are to be agile, innovative and progressive. We provide the land managers of the present access to all these skillsets, to ensure the coming global transition is an opportunity – arguably the biggest business opportunity in 10,000 years. Let’s grasp it.

Key takeaways

· Climate change will reshape where and how we grow food.

· Transport emissions are often outweighed by production efficiency.

· Technologies like vertical farming and fermentation are scaling fast.

· Integrated land use combining ecology and food production is essential.

· Contact your Galbraith office for advice on how we can help.