For industry, the infrastructure and market signals needed to support stacked farms are mostly missing. The report explores this through three practical focus areas – rotation and soil health, agrivoltaics, and the commercial case for nutrient dense food – before setting out what each audience needs to do differently.
UK farming has a structural problem: most farms are designed around a single principal output, leaving them financially exposed and environmentally underused. This report asks how farmers can design land and business systems that produce multiple outputs, food, energy, environmental goods, and community value, deliberately and simultaneously, rather than by accident. I call this stacking.
I deliberately avoided the well-trodden path of celebrated exemplars and tested my own assumptions rather than simply confirming them. I visited as wide a range of businesses as possible: intensive single output operations, highly diversified enterprises, cooperatives, research farms, processing businesses, and policy institutions. Across 10 countries I had over 200 conversations with farmers, agronomists, food businesses, bankers, advisors, conservationists, and policymakers.