Speaking to AgNavigator ahead of his appearance at next month’s World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London, Eustice argued that the sector has become too narrowly focused on robotics and automation, when the bigger challenge facing farmers is building resilience.
“It’s not about just robots,” said Eustice, who served as a Defra minister for nine years and led the introduction of the Agriculture Act 2020, Environment Act 2021 and Fisheries Act 2020.
“We need it to be supporting the platforms and the technologies that would enable a more regenerative approach to agriculture. We’re going to need a slightly different approach to agriculture that puts more focus on resilience.”
Now managing director of regulatory affairs consultancy Penbroath Ltd, Eustice believes resilience is rapidly becoming one of the defining priorities for farming businesses as extreme weather events become more frequent and financially damaging.
Soil health at the centre of resilience
For Eustice, the path to greater resilience lies not in ever-higher productivity through increased inputs, but in reducing dependence on costly fertilisers and crop protection products while improving soil health.
“I think that resilience is becoming a more prominent consideration due to the increased frequency of extreme weather conditions and the impact of this on the financial resilience of farm enterprises,” he said.
Healthy soils, he argues, can help farmers withstand both droughts and economic shocks. Crops grown in soils with higher organic matter and stronger biological activity are better able to access nutrients and water, reducing production risks.
“The route to improving farm resilience is through reduced inputs and an emphasis on soil health,” he explained. “If we can improve soil health, and have crops that are deeper rooted with more of their needs available in the soil, then drought tolerance can increase.”
Reducing reliance on fertilisers and pesticides would also lower production costs and limit exposure to crop failures, he added.
As a result, Eustice sees biostimulants, organic fertilisers and soil-enhancing products as some of the most important technologies likely to shape agriculture over the coming decade.
“Biostimulants and organic fertilisers that improve the organic matter in the soil are the key technologies that will support soil health and farm resilience,” he said.
Regulatory barriers still exist
While Eustice believes the UK’s current regulatory framework generally enables innovation, he argues that important barriers remain, particularly around how biological products are classified.
According to Eustice, the existing system creates an artificial divide between fertilisers, biostimulants and crop protection products, with regulatory treatment often determined by marketing claims rather than scientific risk assessment.
“The law currently creates an arbitrary division between crop protection products and fertilisers,” he said. “Products are triaged based on the claim made on the label rather than through a sensible assessment of risk.”
He points to phosphite as an example. The substance can be marketed as a biostimulant in some circumstances but classified as a pesticide in others if claims are made regarding disease control.
“In reality, there is a continuum between good crop nutrition, hormone balance in the plant, the presence of symbiotic relationships with beneficial fungi and bacteria and the overall health of the plant,” he said.
As biological and nature-based technologies become increasingly important within farming systems, Eustice believes regulators must move away from rigid product categories and instead assess products according to their actual risk profile.
“We need to move to a system where we start to triage natural compounds commonly used in agriculture based on an assessment of their risk, not just what is stated on a label.”
A profitable future for sustainable farming
Looking ahead to 2035, Eustice believes a successful British agricultural sector must be both environmentally sustainable and economically profitable.
He argues that the transition away from EU-style area payments was necessary because such subsidies largely rewarded land ownership rather than productivity and innovation.
“There was quite a lot of dependence on the old EU subsidies for owning land, but they made little sense and simply inflated land rents,” he said.
Instead, he believes public funding should reward good farm management practices that build resilience, particularly around soil health.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and related schemes should, he argues, provide farmers with a genuine financial return rather than merely compensating them for lost income.
“If we want farmers to embrace sustainable practices then we should not begrudge them a profit margin for entering schemes,” he said.
That approach reflects his broader view that future agricultural policy should encourage practices that strengthen farm businesses while delivering environmental improvements, rather than treating sustainability as a cost farmers must absorb.
Regulatory agility key to innovation
Eustice also remains a strong advocate of regulatory flexibility as a driver of agricultural innovation.
Discussing precision breeding and gene editing, he argued that the UK’s ability to design its own regulatory framework outside the European Union provides an opportunity to attract investment and scientific expertise.
“I believe that growth in a modern economy comes from having regulatory agility with the freedom to construct sensible regulatory regimes that then attract investment and knowledge,” he said.
While welcoming progress since the introduction of the Genetic Technologies Act, Eustice said he would have liked to have seen implementation happen more quickly.
“I think that progress has been made but I would have liked to see it rolled out faster and I now fear that the EU will exploit the current negotiations on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) alignment to undermine British interests and science in a way calculated to prevent us from showing leadership in this field.”
For Eustice, however, the bigger challenge remains ensuring innovation is directed towards the right goals. As climate pressures intensify, he believes agri-tech must extend beyond automation and efficiency gains to focus on the foundations of resilient farming systems.
