From Policy to Practice: Soil Science Needs Farmer Experience
Blog written by Elizabeth Williams for the Society of Agriculture
In the early 1940s, British agriculture was being asked a very different question from the one it faces today. Wartime disruption had drastically reduced food and fertiliser imports, and the urgent priority was to produce more food at home. The National Farm Survey of 1941-1943 recorded more than 300,000 farms across England and Wales, helping government understand how land could be brought into cultivation and productivity increased. After the war, the Agriculture Act 1947 continued that emphasis, supporting farm profitability and food production through guaranteed prices for key agricultural products. For decades, the direction was clear: produce more, become more efficient, and strengthen national food security.
Now, over eighty years later, food security remains fundamental - but the expectations placed on agricultural land have widened considerably. Farms are still expected to produce food and remain economically viable, while also being asked to contribute to cleaner water, biodiversity recovery, climate resilience and healthier soils. England’s current Environmental Improvement Plan is clear evidence of this change. It describes soil as one of our greatest natural assets and sets a target for at least 40% of agricultural soil to be sustainably managed by 2028, rising to 60% by 2030. The Sustainable Farming Incentive now pays farmers and land managers for actions intended to protect the environment while supporting food production and productivity.
That change in policy tells an interesting story. We have moved from asking predominantly how much land can produce, towards the more complicated question of how land can continue producing while maintaining the natural systems on which farming itself depends.
What do we already know?
Soil makes this question impossible to ignore. Healthy soils support crop production, nutrient cycling, water storage, biodiversity and resilience to weather extremes. Yet improving soil quality is seldom as simple as identifying a scientifically desirable practice and asking farmers to put it in place.
Research in UK agriculture already demonstrates this complexity. Jaworski and colleagues carried out the first national-scale study of sustainable soil management practices in the UK. Among mixed and arable farmers, awareness of most sustainable soil management practices exceeded 60%, while uptake exceeded 30%. Perhaps most strikingly, 92% of respondents considered themselves to be practising sustainable soil management. Farmers were also actively experimenting: practices such as cover cropping, direct drilling, minimum tillage and greater crop diversity were among those being trialled.
To me, that finding is important because it challenges a simplistic narrative. The problem is not that farmers have somehow failed to hear that soil matters. Many are already managing, adapting and experimenting.
What varies is what sustainable management looks like in practice.
Jaworski et al. found that farmers combined practices in different ways, rather than following a single prescribed model. A wider meta-analysis of 69 studies into soil-conservation adoption reached a similarly useful conclusion: there were remarkably few universal predictors of adoption across different circumstances. Context matters. Farm type matters. The characteristics of a practice matter. The people making the decisions matter.
That is where the subject becomes particularly interesting to me.
When good science meets a working farm
As a Biological Sciences student, I spend much of my time reading research in which an intervention is measured, analysed and discussed in terms of whether it “works”. That evidence is essential. But agriculture adds another layer: something can work experimentally without necessarily being workable everywhere.
A farming decision must survive it’s interaction with fluctuations in weather, cashflow, machinery, labour, tenancy, markets, existing rotations and uncertainty about what happens next.
Research into farmer decision-making recognises this. Dessart, Barreiro-Hurlé and van Bavel reviewed two decades of research on the adoption of sustainable farming practices and found that decisions cannot be understood through economics alone. Social influences, attitudes, perceptions and the way farmers process risk and information also matter. In UK horticulture, Feliciano similarly found that efficiency and cost reduction, regulation and market demand were important influences on the adoption of sustainable practices, alongside environmental and social motivations.
There is also the question of knowledge itself.
Julie Ingram’s research with farmers and agricultural advisors in England found that farmers' knowledge of soils and sustainable management was generally well developed, while also identifying areas where more complex practices demanded additional scientific understanding and support. That distinction matters. Practical knowledge built from years of working in a particular field is not the same thing as knowledge produced by an experiment, but neither is dispensable.
When I first contacted The Source, Alan Spedding described this divide rather neatly: sometimes it feels as though farmers and researchers are speaking entirely different languages.
I think there is something important in this observation.
Scientific knowledge can remain almost trapped behind technical language, journal access and academic conventions. In the same way, the detailed experience of people managing land every day does not always find its way back into research questions or policy design. My wider environmental work has made me increasingly interested in this point where evidence meets implementation: not simply what does the science say?, but what happens to that evidence once somebody acts on it?
From policy to practice
This matters particularly now because agricultural policy is changing rapidly.
The Agriculture Act 2020 marked the first major piece of domestic agricultural legislation since 1947, accompanying England's move away from the EU Common Agricultural Policy towards a system placing greater emphasis on environmental public goods. In 2026, SFI continues that transition by paying for sustainable land-management actions intended to benefit the environment while supporting production and productivity. England's new Farming Roadmap to 2050 also places healthy soils at the centre of productive farming, nature recovery and climate resilience.
But policy on paper and decisions in a farm business are not the same thing.
The current Environmental Improvement Plan recognises the need for consistent soil-health monitoring and clearer principles for sustainable soil management; the government's latest progress reporting shows that parts of this work are still being developed. That creates both an opportunity and a responsibility to understand how support is experienced by the people expected to deliver it.
This is the question at the heart of my University of Warwick research project, From Policy to Practice: Understanding How Farmer Decision-Making Influences the Adoption of Sustainable Soil Management Practices in England.
I am very much a new researcher, and I do not approach this project believing that I have the solution to the challenges facing English agriculture. In many ways, that is precisely why I want to ask you these questions.
My survey explores which soil-management practices farmers and land managers currently use, how management has changed, what motivates change, what makes it difficult, how soil is monitored, which sources of advice are trusted, and how current environmental schemes are experienced.
The overall aim is simple: to understand what influences the journey from good evidence and good intentions to an actual decision on a farm.
If a practice could improve soil health but creates unacceptable short-term financial risk, what would make it viable? If a scheme offers worthwhile outcomes but feels too uncertain or complicated, what needs to change? If farmers place greater trust in an agronomist, adviser or neighbouring farmer than in a scientific paper, how could research travel through those trusted networks more effectively?
Those are questions that cannot be answered from a laboratory or policy document alone.
Listening before recommending
I hope this project can make a small contribution to narrowing that gap.
I do not expect one student project to tell us everything about sustainable farming in England, nor should it. Farming is far too varied for that. What I hope it can do is add another piece of evidence to a larger puzzle: one grounded in the experiences of the people actually making these decisions.
If you are a farmer or land manager involved in day-to-day or strategic land-management decisions in England, I would therefore be extremely grateful for your perspective. The anonymous survey takes around 10 minutes, and responses will contribute to my University of Warwick research and the recommendations that follow from it.
Survey linkLink opens in a new window
Good environmental policy needs good science. But science is only part of the journey. If sustainable soil management is to endure, the evidence, the economics, the policy and the practical realities of farming must meet somewhere in the middle.
For me, learning where that meeting point lies is what From Policy to Practice is all about.
Elizabeth Williams
UG Researcher MBio Biological Sciences, University of Warwick
Reference list for further reading
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2025)Environmental Improvement Plan 2025. London: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Available at: GOV.UK – Environmental Improvement Plan 2025(Accessed: 13 August 2026).
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2026a)Agriculture Act 2020: Post-Legislative Assessment. London: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Available at: GOV.UK – Agriculture Act 2020: Post-Legislative Assessment(Accessed: 13 August 2026).
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2026b)Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England’s Future. London: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Available at: GOV.UK – Farming Roadmap 2050(Accessed: 14 August 2026).
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and Rural Payments Agency (2026)Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 (SFI26): Scheme Rules and Guidance. Available at: GOV.UK – SFI26 Scheme Rules and Guidance(Accessed: 14 August 2026).
Dessart, F.J., Barreiro-Hurlé, J. and van Bavel, R. (2019) ‘Behavioural factors affecting the adoption of sustainable farming practices: a policy-oriented review’,European Review of Agricultural Economics, 46(3), pp. 417–471. doi: 10.1093/erae/jbz019
Feliciano, D. (2022) ‘Factors influencing the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices: the case of seven horticultural farms in the United Kingdom’,Scottish Geographical Journal, 138(3–4), pp. 291–320. doi: 10.1080/14702541.2022.2151041.
Ingram, J. (2008) ‘Are farmers in England equipped to meet the knowledge challenge of sustainable soil management? An analysis of farmer and advisor views’,Journal of Environmental Management, 86(1), pp. 214–228. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2006.12.036.
Jaworski, C.C., Krzywoszynska, A., Leake, J.R. and Dicks, L.V. (2024) ‘Sustainable soil management in the United Kingdom: a survey of current practices and how they relate to the principles of regenerative agriculture’,Soil Use and Management, 40(1), e12908. doi: 10.1111/sum.12908.
The National Archives (n.d.)National Farm Survey of England and Wales, 1941–1943. Available at:
The National Archives – National Farm Survey(Accessed: 17 August 2026).