An agroforestry transition in the Fens
Stephen Briggs is helping design and lead a nation-wide farm transition plan. Matthew Phan caught up with him in his Fens base to hear how Stephen has fared in transitioning his own farm.
Stephen Briggs should be no stranger to farmers in the UK. Technical director of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) as well as Innovation for Agriculture (IfA) and Deputy Chair of the UK’s Agricultural & Horticultural Development Board, Stephen was one of the first UK farmers to experiment with agroforestry techniques, later embarking on a Nuffield Scholarship sponsored study of farms across Europe, Asia, Africa and the US to more deeply understand agroecological principles and bring them back to the UK.
That thinking is now critical as Stephen is helping design and lead a nation-wide farm transition plan, as part of a new partnership between RASE and North Star Transition. This aims to design, pilot and scale up new farming models which are profitable and resilient, in economic and environmental terms. We wanted to understand Stephen’s views on the benefits and challenges to farms attempting such a transition.
Stephen’s background is eclectic – he started as an engineer, retrained in agricultural and soil science, then worked with development agencies in Africa and India for years, before returning to England. Acquiring a farm in the mid-2000s, Stephen transitioned it slowly on regenerative principles, including planting 4,500 apple trees – partly to protect the soil from serious wind erosion – and switching crops into organic cereals and different vegetables. Besides successfully running his own farm, he also consults with farm businesses of all sorts and sizes in the UK and Internationally.
Economics benefits of agroforestry
Stephen’s full Nuffield report (here) captures much of his learning at the time and there are more recent public videos where he discusses the benefits of agroforestry. These benefits are multiple and varied, across soil, climate, biodiversity, food production and economic productivity. For this blog, we focus on the latter aspects, seeing economic factors as one of the major motivations, yet also a key risk, for farmers aiming to transition.
Here, three key benefits appear to be:
o Potential for much higher productivity A key concept here is the Land Equivalent Ratio (see Figure 1) – the equivalent amount of land under monoculture that is needed to produce the same yield as an agroforestry combination of trees and crops. Agroforestry can achieve an LER of up to 1.4x, which means land can produce as much as 40% per hectare more than if was mono-cropped. Many systems, including Stephen’s, achieve LERs of c 1.25, or 25% more productivity.
o Higher margins, and much lower working capital needs – improving returns Readers familiar with regenerative farming will already know that output is often lower, but margins are higher, owing to lower input costs. An additional subtlety to the finances is that the lower input costs also mean working capital needs can be 30-40% lower than in a conventional farming business. In practical terms, this means a farmer needs to put significantly less capital into the business, which also means a higher return on that capital.
o Greater diversity and resilience Agroforestry can mean three to four revenue generators on one farm; Stephen also reports a halving of crop loss under an agroforestry system, due to diverse eco-system benefits around soil and nature. He also started a farm shop onsite, to juice and retail his apples directly, tripling his profit margins on that revenue stream compared to selling wholesale to supermarkets.
Figure 1: Land Equivalent Ratio of productivity
Agroforestry can be up to 40% more productive per hectare. Fascinatingly, part of this is because agroforestry operates in three dimensions. For example, crop roots and tree roots draw nutrients at different depths. Wheat, corn, and other arable roots operate down to 40 cm, while nearly 90% of tree roots operate at 40-100cm. Thus a combination of planting better maximizes the depth of the farmer’s land.
The costs of agroforestry
On the flip side, the costs involved include:
Time It is interesting that this is the first item Stephen raises. There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and foregone revenues on the land use, which varies by venture. Switching a crop variety might show results in a year, while if a farmer switches to a different genetic breed of livestock, it might take 5-10 years to see the results. Planting perennials like fruit trees might also take 5-10 years to (literally) bear fruit, while timber might take 40-50 years. Returns from carbon or nature markets are also inherently uncertain. What a farmer can take on depends on their risk appetite, as well as any needs in terms of managing cash flows and seeing a faster return. There is also complexity around land tenure, as tenant farmers with shorter leases (the UK average is under 5 years) might be constrained from making long term investments.
Capex and operating costs. The obvious costs are the upfront capital needs to start a new enterprise, and perhaps less obviously, the time and other investment needed to build up skills and knowledge. In Stephen’s case, he set up a controlled traffic farming system – where machines traverse only on narrow strips across the land and thus maximises the undamaged soil area for farming – which needed equipment like a cultivator, drill, hoe and combine.
That said, it is not clear that finances are the biggest obstacle – in some cases the reduction in input costs offsets upfront capital costs from the get-go.
One challenge is that to date databases on farming transitions are largely based on ‘biophysical’, not financial data, so building a database of economic costs and benefits associated with different ventures is still a work in progress. Stephen notes elsewhere that farm assessment models are strong on the biophysical aspects but need to bring in the economic or cashflow impact of different initiatives under different scenarios, to help farmers plan ahead.
Financing Critically, the question is whether a farmer can access bank financing, if needed, for a transition. Farmers are typically asset rich but cash poor, and borrowing is usually backed by the land as collateral. In Stephen’s opinion, access to finance for change is possible, but most established providers remain comfortable with current production systems and are nervous about lending for innovation. The collateral-based lending system also makes it harder, again, for tenant farmers, who cannot leverage the asset and on top of that need cashflow to pay rent; Stephen says tenant farmers need to be more astute economically, have an open mindset to diversification and take more risk.
Obstacles to change
Given the potential benefits of a transition to agroforestry, farmers exploring such a change face a number of hurdles in their path.
Knowledge The biggest barrier is not knowing what is possible and thus being limited by the people around you. Agroforestry is a much more complex as an operation, requiring farmers to think about how to layer capital, skills and people. Stephen is constantly experimenting – he recruits a handful of Ph.D. students every year to trial different things on his farm – but says that in general science is ‘reductionist’ while farming and land management are by definition ‘systems based, multi-layered and interconnected.’
Mindset Running a business also requires a different mindset to that of a pure focus on operating efficiency – harking back to an earlier part of our conversation, around derisking, Stephen talks about having a big picture mindset of reducing risk and increasing control. A traditional farming business is a passive price taker in many ways, with limited control around what is produced, the input costs and the output price – whereas a more resilient approach is about taking control over the different elements that present risk. This might include building your own access to markets, reducing vulnerability to weather or climate, better control over costs and prices, and so on.
Risk sharing We discuss technology, but here Stephen is interested less in the latest robotics and more in governance and contracts. Tenancy has arisen as a constraint several times but here he introduces another idea – is there a way to finance transition in such a way that the farmer does not bear all the economic risk? Is it possible for landowners and tenants to share a vision and economic interests, with equitable rewards and risks accruing to both parties? This extends to other stakeholders: Every farm in the current paradigm is connected to other businesses, from upstream suppliers of fertilizer or equipment to downstream marketers and retailers, who don’t want to see change – is there a way to organize so as to share the risks and rewards of change? Risk sharing does exist in farming – where seed suppliers provide products at a lower cost and take a profit share; they are not widespread but have potential to unlock change.
Change is a necessity
Transition is not a one-size-fits-all journey. Yet, across different geographies and ownership models in the UK, successful examples of agroforestry include silvo-pasture in highland grazing systems in Scotland, community farming in Shropshire, and agroforestry in East Anglia across large- and mid-scale plots.
As Stephen reminds us, farming today is not just about growing food — it's about managing complexity, adapting to uncertainty, and reclaiming agency in the face of risk. While the economic case for agroforestry and regenerative practices is increasingly clear — with higher land productivity, lower input costs, and more resilient income streams — the real challenge lies in knowledge, mindsets, networks, and risk-sharing across the value chain.
Transition is not a one-size-fits-all journey. Across different geographies and ownership models in the UK, we can see successful examples of transition, including silvo-pasture in highland grazing systems in Scotland, community farming in Shropshire and Stephen’s own agroforestry work in East Anglia.
The question for Stephen is no longer if change must happen — but how we can equip every farmer to lead it.
