UK agricultural colleges often struggle to embrace regenerative practices. Alex Gray looks at how the next generation of farmers might be convinced to embrace ecology in their practice.
I was raised in rural Lincolnshire, surrounded by monocultures of wheat and oilseed rape, alongside fields of turf destined for Britain’s famous sports pitches. Farming was familiar to me: my family had farmed a generation earlier. Yet my fascination was with nature. I spent days fishing, searching beneath stones for critters and immersing myself in the life of the countryside.
That fascination led me to a master’s in environmental management and work as an ecologist. I expected to help restore wildlife. Instead, I encountered landscapes reduced to phrases such as “species-poor grassland” and “arable stubble”. Too often, ecological work facilitated the conversion of impoverished land into development, offset by a pond or narrow strip of habitat. It rarely felt genuinely nature-positive.
The thought was simple: around 70% of the UK is agricultural land. If nature recovery is to happen meaningfully, it must happen on working farms and at scale. Regenerative farming offered an ambition beyond adding an isolated buffer strip or beetle bank to an otherwise unchanged system. Agroecology applies this thinking by treating the farm as a relationship between ecological processes and human enterprise. That realisation led me into agricultural education.
Disappointingly, upon entering land-based education, I found agroecology and regenerative farming largely outside the awareness of existing staff and regarded with outright hostility by some. Land-based colleges possess extensive estates, specialist facilities, teaching expertise and considerably greater resources than many smaller training providers. If the infrastructure already exists, why has agroecology remained relatively peripheral within mainstream agricultural education?
The greatest obstacle to delivering agroecological training at scale is the reluctance of established institutions to challenge the assumptions and traditions upon which much agricultural education has been built.
The answer, I would argue, lies less in capability than in culture. The greatest obstacle to delivering agroecological training at scale is the reluctance of established institutions to challenge the assumptions and traditions upon which much agricultural education has been built.
Agricultural colleges occupy an unusual position. They must retain the confidence of today’s farming community while preparing learners for tomorrow’s agriculture. Colleges often recruit students from farming families, depend upon relationships with local employers and employ lecturers frequently drawn from the industries they teach. This gives land-based education its practical credibility, but can also make colleges culturally conservative. Familiar practices acquire authority because they are familiar, while alternatives must continually prove their legitimacy.
Resistance to agroecology, therefore, need not take the form of outright opposition. More often, it is expressed through what an institution treats as normal. A regenerative system might be supported as an interesting project while conventional practice remains the unquestioned baseline. Agroforestry may appear in a module without influencing how the college estate is managed. Ecology can be taught competently while remaining culturally separate from what is regarded as “real agriculture”.
This is where the hidden curriculum becomes important: what students see at college without being overtly taught. Students notice which machinery is showcased, which employers are invited onto campus, which enterprises receive investment and which careers are regarded as benchmarks of success.
Colleges also compete to attract prospective students, creating an understandable temptation to demonstrate investment through impressive machinery and technology. A new tractor, drill or precision farming system is highly visible at an open day or on social media. A resilient farming system built around lower inputs, healthier soils and ecological processes is harder to display. The danger is that investment in machinery becomes confused with agricultural progress itself. This is not an argument against technology, but colleges should demonstrate resilient and profitable farming systems with the same confidence with which they showcase machinery.
A regenerative system might be supported as an interesting project while conventional practice remains the unquestioned baseline.
The greatest obstacle to delivering agroecological training at scale is the reluctance of established institutions to challenge the assumptions and traditions upon which much agricultural education has been built.
Students do not arrive as blank slates. Many possess strong agricultural identities shaped by family farms, neighbouring farmers, machinery, employers, social media and local Young Farmers’ Clubs. Asking them to reconsider agricultural practice can therefore challenge ideas connected to family, community and identity. The objective should not be to replace one agricultural identity with another, but to expand what young people understand good farming to encompass.
The divide between agriculture and conservation within land-based education also matters. Students interested in food production can see themselves as fundamentally different from those motivated by wildlife conservation. Yet landscapes recognise no such distinction. Farmers manage soils, rivers, biodiversity, food production and businesses simultaneously. Agricultural education should help dissolve these competing identities, producing land managers for whom productive farming and ecological recovery are complementary rather than opposing ambitions.
Achieving this requires more than rewriting course specifications. A college could add modules on soil health, agroforestry or biodiversity while leaving its underlying culture virtually untouched. If these subjects remain peripheral to the main farming enterprise, students may interpret them as environmental additions to what they continue to regard as real farming.
This is why visible practice matters. At Brooksby, projects across the college estate have been used not simply to teach agroecological skills but to help normalise agroecological land uses. Students encounter different approaches embedded within the everyday landscape, so practices integrating production, ecology and wider land management cease to appear unusual or separate from agriculture.
Crucially, agricultural colleges should not simply reflect the culture of farming; they should help shape it.
I have experienced that process personally. In establishing some of these projects, I have at times been regarded as something of the college eccentric, provoking variations of “What’s he doing now?” or “Why is he planting more trees?” from colleagues and managers. Much of this has been good-humoured curiosity, although not always; unfamiliar approaches can generate genuine scepticism or frustration. Yet repeated exposure gradually makes the unusual familiar, and to an extent this has been the case at our college.
Cultural transitions rarely occur through information alone. When students repeatedly see agroecological approaches being tested and taken seriously by respected lecturers, farmers and employers, the boundaries of legitimate farming begin to move.
Working college estates are particularly powerful in this respect. Rather than simply teaching farms, they can become living laboratories where students, lecturers, farmers and researchers test ideas under commercial conditions. Farmers can inspect trials alongside conservation organisations and other stakeholders, sharing experience and challenging assumptions. The estate becomes a place where evidence is generated and cultural change becomes visible.
Smaller independent organisations have sometimes moved faster. Across Britain, providers already deliver regenerative and agroecological training through short courses, demonstration farms, CPD and longer programmes, building their identities around these approaches from the outset. Established colleges carry considerably more history. Paradoxically, institutions with the greatest estates, facilities and capacity to deliver agroecological education at scale may therefore face the greatest cultural inertia. Smaller providers demonstrate that different models can work; larger colleges should draw upon these proven approaches.
Young Farmers’ Clubs also deserve attention. Agriculture is unusual among vocational industries in possessing independent youth organisations capable of shaping professional identity outside formal education. YFCs can reinforce existing ideas about successful farming or help make emerging approaches culturally normal. Their influence is substantial precisely because cultural change cannot be delivered by classrooms alone.
Government risks encouraging one agricultural transition in the field while the institutions training the next generation continue to normalise another.
None of this means abandoning agricultural tradition. Practical competence, commercial realism and accumulated farming knowledge remain essential. The task is to allow agricultural culture to evolve without presenting that evolution as a rejection of those who came before.
This transition will require leadership beyond individual institutions. In England, the Department for Education must consider how colleges are supported and incentivised to broaden their approach, while Defra is well placed to articulate why change is necessary. Its recent Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England’s Future specifically calls for wider adoption of agroecological practices to improve soil health and water retention, alongside encouraging regenerative farming principles through the Sustainable Farming Incentive. If Defra regards these approaches as strategically important to the future of English agriculture, that ambition must be reflected in the education of those who will manage it. This requires dialogue between Defra and the Department for Education to ensure that the culture being shaped within agricultural colleges is aligned with the direction of national farming policy. Otherwise, government risks encouraging one agricultural transition in the field while the institutions training the next generation continue to normalise another.
Crucially, agricultural colleges should not simply reflect the culture of farming; they should help shape it. Every demonstration, employer partnership, practical exercise and investment communicates an idea of successful farming. Curricula can be rewritten relatively quickly, but institutional cultures often take a generation to evolve. Every generation of farmers inherits more than techniques; it inherits an idea of what good farming looks like.
The purpose of agroecological education should therefore be more ambitious than producing students who understand agroecology. It should help create a generation of farmers for whom agroecological thinking no longer feels alternative. If land-based colleges can achieve that cultural transition, they will not simply respond to the changing future of British agriculture; they will help create it.
