In 2008 my Nuffield Scholarship study warned that UK farming faced a new entrant crisis driven by land access, succession failure and closed networks. Sixteen years later, nothing has changed, so we built OFFA to change it.

The report nobody acted on

In 2008 I completed a Nuffield Scholarship study sponsored by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association. The title was The Next Generation of Farmers. I travelled to France, Hungary, the USA and Portugal to research how other countries were tackling the challenge of getting young, skilled, ambitious people into farming.

The findings were not complicated. Over 50% of decision makers in UK agricultural businesses were over 55. Land held a value above and beyond its productive capacity, making entry almost impossible without inheritance or significant capital. County farm estates, one of the few genuine ladders into the industry, were being sold off at a rate of nearly 2,000 hectares a year. Succession was stalling on family farms, with the Farm Boy Syndrome affecting more than 15% of UK farming businesses. Sons and daughters in their fifties were still waiting for management responsibility while ageing parents refused to step back. And the underused land that could provide a foothold for new entrants was invisible, traded through private networks that no outsider could access.

The conclusion of that report called for a web-based portal to connect new entrants with land opportunities. It called for cross-industry buy-in from landlords, land agents and farm businesses to make those connections possible. It called for succession to be opened up as a conversation rather than a crisis.

Nobody built it.

Sixteen years later

I am now chair of the Succession Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation we launched because the succession conversation in UK farming is still not being had at the scale or the pace it needs. As we say at the Alliance, succession does not happen by chance. It happens by choice. Too often, farming families leave these conversations until it is too late, and the result is conflict, uncertainty and lost opportunity for the next generation.

The statistics have barely moved since 2008. Over a third of England’s farm holders are now over 65. Just 5% are under 35. The average age of a British farm holder is pushing 60. A 2023 Nuffield survey found that 72% of young people said it was difficult or impossible to get into farming, with land access named as the biggest single barrier. The county farm estate in England is smaller than it was when I wrote my report. The closed networks that control access to grazing lets, seasonal opportunities and underused land are, if anything, more entrenched.

In Norfolk specifically, where my study was rooted and where I have spent my career, the situation is exactly as I described it in 2008. Norfolk County Council’s county farms estate now lets to around 95 tenants across 16,000 acres, fewer tenants than the 145 I cited in my report, on broadly the same acreage. When tenancies do come up they are oversubscribed. The grazing marsh market is still run through phone chains and repeat deals between familiar names. The new entrant with the skills, the ambition and the plan still cannot find the ground they need because nobody has built the platform to connect them.

What I found in Iowa in 2008 and what it means now

One of the most striking things I encountered during my Nuffield research was the Beginning Farmer Centre at Iowa State University. Its mission was simple: to facilitate the matching of beginning farmers with existing farmers who wanted to pass their farm businesses on to the next generation. Iowa had recognised that 60% of its farmland was rented and 55% was owned by people over 65, many of whom had no family successor and no clear plan for what happened when they were ready to step back.

The solution was not grants or government schemes. It was a matching service. A way for the people with land and the people who needed land to find each other, with a structure around it that built trust and enabled the relationship to develop.

I came home from Iowa with a clear recommendation. England needed the same thing. What I could not have known in 2008 was that it would take another sixteen years before anyone built it.

Underused land, share farming and the opportunity Norfolk is sitting on

My 2008 report identified two categories of underused land. The first was land not producing at its optimum level, Norfolk arable ground, for example, where converting even a proportion to higher-value horticulture or specialist cropping could significantly increase gross value added. The second was land that was simply not being farmed at all, poorly located parcels, land connected to non-farming holdings, aging farmers finding the outlying fields too much to manage, permanent pasture with no stock on it.

The report concluded that new entrants were uniquely placed to unlock that second category. They had time, energy and skills to invest in land that an established business could not justify prioritising. What they did not have was a way to find it.

That observation is as true today as it was in 2008. The permanent pasture sitting idle on Norfolk farms, the cover crops going ungrazed into spring, the stewardship and SFI blocks that need livestock to deliver their environmental outcomes, all of it represents a genuine opportunity for new entrant livestock farmers, young graziers building their first flock, and livestock businesses looking to expand without the capital cost of buying or renting a whole farm. The land is there. The people are there. The willingness exists on both sides. The matching has never happened at scale because there has never been a platform to make it happen.

Offa is the platform my 2008 report called for

I built Offa because I got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.

It is not complicated. It is a platform that makes underused Norfolk farming land visible, permanent pasture, cover crops, stubble fields, stewardship ground, SFI blocks, leys between rotations, and connects the landowners who have it with the farmers and new entrants who need it. Grazing agreements, share farming arrangements, seasonal lets, crop agreements. Flexible, farmer-to-farmer, without agents or long leases or closed networks.

The Succession Alliance works with farming families who are ready to have the conversation about the future of their land. Offa gives those families a practical next step, a way to find a young farmer who can work that land, build a relationship, and perhaps in time become the successor that the farm needs.

My Nuffield report in 2008 concluded that England needed a web-based portal to connect new entrants with land, backed by cross-industry support. It took sixteen years. But here it is.

If you are a new entrant farmer in Norfolk looking for land, or a landowner with ground that is not earning what it should, join Offa. The matching problem has a solution now.