To view the full written report, follow this link - https://www.nuffieldscholar.org/reports/gb/2026/stacking-land-uses-business-and-environmental-sustainability
Executive Summary
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.
What I found was not a single model but a consistent principle: the farms building long term resilience were those that had stopped treating single output farming as the default.
"Using land for a single crop or function is a luxury the UK can no longer afford." David Oates, Nuffield Scholar 2025
Key Findings
1. Single output farming is a structural vulnerability. A farm that depends on one crop, one market, or one income stream is one bad harvest or policy change away from crisis. Every hectare can produce multiple outputs - carbon, water, biodiversity, community, energy - whether the farmer accounts for them or not. Stacking means designing deliberately for all of them.
2. Producing food that supports human health is farming's greatest contribution, and public procurement is the most powerful lever for making it viable. The long-term cost of poor nutrition extends far beyond the NHS. Denmark's model, 60 per cent organic in public kitchens and 90 per cent in Copenhagen, without increasing meal costs, shows what is possible when government uses its buying power deliberately.
3. Agrivoltaics works, but design standards are the difference between genuine dual use and agricultural displacement. Sheep grazing beneath panels is legitimate land use stacking, but it is not agrivoltaics, which requires farming to remain the primary activity, with the solar system designed around it. Italy's legislative model, minimum panel height, 70 per cent land in active production, 60 per cent electricity output, continuous monitoring, is the clearest template for UK planning.
4. Planning designations made for a different era are preventing the best use of land today. The planning system must be reoriented around outcomes - what does this land produce, for whom, and at what environmental cost - rather than inherited categories.
Taken together, these findings carry the same message for three audiences. For farmers, stacking is a resilience strategy available today, not a future technology. For policymakers, the way land is currently classified, financed, and regulated penalises businesses that try to do more than one thing with it. 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.
