Findings at a Glance

DEFRA’s Farming Roadmap 2050 outlines a 25-year vision for English farming, but it never once engages with protein as a strategic issue. Published in June 2026 alongside the government’s response to Baroness Batters’s Farming Profitability Review, the Roadmap brings together DEFRA’s “commitments on food security, environmental recovery, land use, climate resilience, and animal health and welfare into a single, coherent direction of travel”. This insight examines what the Roadmap leaves out, the evidence it cites, and the welfare improvements that it envisions but declines to require. For anyone interested in the future of protein in the UK, the gaps in this document matter as much as its commitments.

There Is No Direct Mention of Protein in DEFRA’s 25-Year Vision

The Farming Roadmap 2050 contains the word ‘protein’ only once, in the title of a cited source, and it never names the UK’s emerging alternative proteins sector. The Roadmap does make some references to meat and livestock, and it contains a single mention of plant-based food in DEFRA’s plan to explore lower emission farming systems, which includes “growing oilseeds and pulses as demand for plant-based foods increases”. However, the absence of protein is striking, and even more so given the recent release of the EU’s Protein Action Plan.

While the Roadmap is silent on protein, the EU has just produced a strategy that centres it. The Action Plan for resilience, strategic autonomy and sustainability of the EU protein system, published by the European Commission in July 2026, addresses the concern that the EU is made vulnerable by its livestock sector’s dependence on imported high-protein animal feed – a vulnerability also shared by the UK. The Protein Action Plan, released alongside the European Commission’s Livestock Strategy, is focused primarily on plant-derived protein for animal feed. However, it does explicitly engage with plant-based and alternative protein sources for human consumption, recognising that “increased sales of plant-based protein products create opportunities for farmers and rural communities”.

To address this vulnerability, the Protein Action Plan makes a series of recommendations to “support the development of protein crops” in EU countries, including “establishing a dedicated protein crop sector”, and using Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) tools to increase the appeal of protein diversification to farmers. Batters’s Farming Profitability Review makes a similar case, recommending that the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) be linked to food production, including “oilseeds, pulses and circular protein crops like peas and beans” for both “human and livestock consumption, replacing our reliance on imported soya”.

DEFRA does address this recommendation in the response to Batters’s Review, writing that Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes are designed to be World Trade Organisation (WTO) ‘Green Box’ compliant, meaning that the SFI can only compensate farmers for extra costs or income given up in taking environmental actions, not for the production of specific crops. However, DEFRA will “explore the potential to expand the low-input actions that are available for cereals (as these actions contribute to our environmental targets) to protein crops in future SFI offers”. Protein, then, is a substantial part of ongoing EU farming strategy, and it earns a place in the Farming Profitability Review recommendations. But, while it warrants engagement in DEFRA’s response, it is conspicuously absent from the Roadmap’s 25-year vision for English farming.

The Roadmap Wants Lower Emissions, But Does Not Address Livestock Reduction

The absence of protein is clearest in DEFRA’s climate commitments. The Roadmap recognises that agricultural emissions are a serious challenge, citing the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) Seventh Carbon Budget, which suggests they “may need to fall by around 45% by 2050 compared to 2022 levels”. To achieve that reduction, the Roadmap sets out some on-farm measures such as “optimising soil pH, utilising cover crops and improving farm fuel and energy efficiency”. However, the CCC’s Balanced Pathway to the 45% reduction relies substantially on meat and dairy consumption falling by 35% and 20% respectively, against 2019 levels, and a 38% reduction in cattle and sheep numbers against 2023 levels. Furthermore, the CCC states that “meat products will be mainly replaced by existing alternative protein products (for example, plant-based burgers), some plant-based whole foods and, in the later years, novel alternative proteins”.

The Roadmap also states that “levels of meat consumption in high income countries, including the UK, are stabilising”. However, DEFRA’s own cited source for this claim, the United Kingdom Food Security Digest 2025, reports the opposite. The Digest states that “the UK’s consumption of meat is declining”, and that “consumption of plant-based alternatives rose by 115%” between 2008–2011 and 2017–2019.

DEFRA’s 25-year vision does not reflect these trends. The Roadmap accepts the CCC’s 45% reduction figure, and its own evidence annex reports that a “fall in animal numbers” was a primary driver of emissions reductions from 1990 to 2024, but it does not address the protein transition that the CCC’s pathway requires, despite the profound implications it could have for English farming. This transition will require substantial production changes if it is to be, in accordance with DEFRA’s vision, sustainable, secure, and beneficial to England’s farming sector. Furthermore, the APA’s Growing Together report posits that “farmers can lead the protein shift”, and that the transition could be a “genuine opportunity” for them, but this is only possible through the right policies. Without addressing these changes the Roadmap is, by its own criteria, incomplete.

Reducing livestock numbers would cut more emissions and free up more land than any other agricultural or land-use measure