24 June 2025

This briefing is based on a webinar discussion with Neil Ward, given to the AFN Network+ community on the 16th June 2025. It is written and collated by Nina Pullman, food systems writer for AFN, and edited by Jez Fredenburgh, knowledge exchange fellow for AFN. The transcript has been lightly edited to paraphrase in parts. You can also watch the webinar.

About the webinar topic

We need radical and transformational change in our food system. However, the scale of the change can sometimes feel overwhelming and paralysing – but we also tend to forget that we’ve done it before, including in living memory, during and after WW2.

The challenges may be different this time, but just as urgent to solve; building resilience in an increasingly uncertain and warming world, preventing further climate disaster by reducing emissions fast, tackling the public health emergency caused by poor diet, regenerating our land and nature, and rebooting our economy.

While it might seem daunting, a sense of agency and ambition can be derived from studying past transitions. In this webinar, Prof Neil Ward explored the characteristics of the last agri-food revolution and asked what can be learnt and applied to our current juncture.

There are three key ingredients to transform farming on the scale needed

1. Reposition the role of agriculture under a similar, patriotic vision for change.
2. Cross-party collaborative approach across agriculture, land use, public health and the wider economy.
3. Scale-up change through publicly coordinated knowledge exchange and innovation.

About Neil Ward

As well as a co-convenor of AFN Network+, Neil Ward is a professor at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he was deputy vice chancellor and PVC-Academic (2013-21). He has held chairs at the University of Leeds and Newcastle University, where he was director of the Centre for Rural Economy from 2004 to 2008.

He has also worked for periods on secondment to the Cabinet Office and as an advisor to the Economic and Social Research Council. He is author of Net Zero, Food and Farming: Climate Change and the UK Agri-Food System (Routledge 2023).