There are bigger issues that are industry wide.
The main issues of why farms cannot produce a good return on investment is partly down to the regulations and standards being incredibly high in the UK, partly down to sheer lack of investment for various reasons, partly down to the supermarkets middlemen buyers thrubscrewing prices, and partly due farming system breakdown in times of war and bad weather, global politics etc.
Personally I would not want standards to drop for food and its production, but it does make us uncompetitive on the global market.
We as a nation have completely sleep walked into the supermarkets holding onto our food resources and our purse strings. They control food prices, they force the destruction of crops in glut years despite there being people who go hungry in this country to control food prices, this utterly boils my blood. It is not beyond our wit to preserve food, we've been doing that since the dawn of time. Some do have farm gate sales but it's the access to customers that is the issue.
The access to market has been entirely restricted for many farms by lack of agricultural infrastructure like nearby abbatoirs and livestock markets, farm shops and many are beholden to the supermarket middleman buyers or big dairy corps for their income. It has utterly stultified the ability of farmers to improve their incomes by producing smaller and more diverse crops that would benefit everybody and help prevent whoelsale losses in times of poor weather and war. Since the 60s we've been conned into producing near monocultures, restricting the availability of foods and variety within those foods thanks to the EU vegetable lists we still have to stick to.
Smaller farms can get a bit of an edge where they have access to different markets, and have teh time and expertise to go into small scale production of speciality foods but these often have to be near urban and higher populated areas to make it fly Many farms do not have that access or time to produce.
The lack of investment is appalling. From our young farmers having few colleges to choose from to train to the access to land for new entrants and tennants. Farming incomes are often too low for real investment and again the market isn't always there. As a technologically advanced industry, we are going to lose our edge because of this. The age of the average farmer keeps increasing, this also breeds a lack of investment because the new entrants that were there just aren;t for many reasons.
Not entirely sure how you can global and weather proof farming, this has always been an issue throughout our history. However increasing our self sufficiency to around 80% again would be a start to help bolster the industry.
First though we should wrestle our markets back from the all powerful supermarket and invest in on farm production or local food processing i.e. cheese making. Just a handful of businesses control our food, this should never have been allowed but we al let that happen.
It's too big a subject really.