What Farmers Really Think About Environmental Baselining

For a long time, the working assumption across policy, retail and parts of the supply chain has been simple: farmers don’t want to share data. They’re wary, defensive, and resistant to national systems.

When IGD commissioned us to explore farmer attitudes to environmental baselining, that was the underlying hypothesis going in; that appetite would be low, driven by concerns around control, fairness and misuse.

What we actually found was far more interesting. Especially as we are on a mission as a business to uncover truths about farming perception and debunk some of the assumptions that have been built over time.

Through a pulse check quant and in-depth interviews across every major farming sector in England, arable, dairy, beef, lamb, poultry, pigs, horticulture and mixed systems, farmers didn’t reject baselining outright. In fact, many saw genuine potential in it.

But only if it’s done properly.

You can download the report here:

the-value-case-of-baselining-englands-land.pdf

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Farmers Aren’t Anti-Data. They’re Anti Being Taken for Granted.

Most of the farmers we spoke to already collect large volumes of data. Yields, soil health, nutrient plans, livestock performance, assurance audits data is already embedded into modern farming. Farmers are doing a lot more than we realise...a lot of the time from their tractor cabs!

The frustration isn’t with data itself. It’s with what happens after it leaves the farm gate.

Repeatedly, farmers told us:

• They don’t know who sees their data

• They don’t know how it’s being used

• They rarely see meaningful feedback

• And they almost never see direct commercial value themselves in sharing it

As one farmer put it bluntly, once data disappears into multiple assurance and buyer systems,

“you have absolutely no idea what they scored you, what anything was meant to be, and it cost an enormous amount of money for zero value add.”

This is the context any national baselining scheme has to operate in: not hostility, but deep fatigue with extractive systems.

The Big Assumption That Didn’t Hold

Despite that fatigue, one of the biggest surprises in the research was how many farmers were open to the principle of baselining itself.

Not as a compliance mechanism.Not as another ESG reporting tool for corporates.

But as a way to:

• Prove what’s really happening on farms

• Improve efficiency and targeting of inputs

• Strengthen credibility with buyers

• Replace assumptions with evidence

One arable farmer summed it up simply:

That idea of decision-making based on reality rather than averages is hugely powerful and still underrated in the traditional food system...but we see it being realised with the multitude of tech start ups operating with real data rather than averages.

Three Non-Negotiables: Fairness, Control, Trust

Across every sector and farm type, three principles came through consistently.

1. Fairness

Farmers were clear on one rule:

Who pays depends on who asks.

If data is being requested by retailers, processors or government, those parties should fund collection and maintenance. Farmers already absorb too much unpaid administrative cost.

2. Control

Ownership of farm data is non-negotiable. Farmers expect:

• The data to remain farm-owned

• Explicit consent for reuse

• Clear visibility of who accesses it

• And, in some cases, payment for secondary commercial use

Tenanted farmers were particularly sensitive here, seeing real risk if data is used in rent negotiations or tenancy renewals.

3. Trust

Trust, once lost, is hard to rebuild. Many farmers referenced past schemes where data was taken but benefits never came back. As a result, there was strong preference for a farmer-involved, co-designed, independent governance model, rather than one led solely by government. This isn’t a mindset of anti-regulation. It’s a desire for checks and balances as well as accountability and returns on a time investment.

Carbon: Important, But Not the Whole Story

Carbon produced some of the strongest emotional responses in the interviews.

Some farmers saw carbon markets as immature, extractive, or primarily driven by the needs of large multinationals. Others were more pragmatic, recognising carbon measurement as useful when it aligns with soil health, fertility, fuel use and overall farm efficiency.

But almost everyone returned to the same point:

Food still comes first for farmers.

Baselining, in farmers’ minds, only works if it strengthens food production and business resilience, working with a system needed to deliver farm profitability, not if it displacing food production for an unknown environmental gain.