AIC On BBC Farming Today Programme – UK Feed Security

AIC’s Head of Feed, James McCulloch, recently spoke to the BBC Farming Today programme (Monday 19 January 2026) about the pressures on UK livestock feed supply this winter and the wider need for a national protein strategy.

James highlighted both feed availability and cost, and the importance of strengthening long-term feed security to protect the nation’s food supply.

You can listen to the interview here (00:15): Farming Today

Transcript

All week we're focusing on what farm animals are eating this winter, from grains to soy and silage: it is a mixture of forage, things grown on the farm like hay or silage; and feed that's bought in from the UK or abroad. A combination of geopolitical events, a challenging UK harvest, and an exceptionally dry summer in some areas has put pressure on the supplies of feed. The Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC) says the UK needs a national protein strategy to safeguard feed security because that impacts food security.

“I think the forage picture for the for the UK was very variable. So, there are some farmers in some parts of the country who are okay in terms of forage for their for their winter requirements, and others who have used up some of their forage they were making for for use over the winter. But there's obviously a cost associated with buying in feed too.”

If you are buying in feed are you looking at a bigger bill than you might have been expecting? 

“Yeah, I mean the markets can be quite variable at the moment. The market, as far as feed and feed materials are concerned, is reasonably quiet. I think that’s the word we would use. We don't expect to see any sort of particular shocks as far as sort of pricing and or availability is concerned, but then we do live in in uncertain times.”

Which brings us to imports. They account for just under half of feed. What do we import? 

“The obvious ones would be the oil seed proteins such as soil, sunflower, maize. We're also reasonably reliant from an import standpoint, on some of our additive groups, so vitamins, amino acids. Enzymes and so forth.”

One thing that surprised me was that I was reading that this year we may import sugar for feed. I had assumed, because we grow sugar beet, that we wouldn't need to do that. 

“I think that was more of a short-term measure that was needed. Sugar beet was maturing much later that anticipating so there was a relatively short period during the course of the autumn, where we had to rely on imports. 

There has been a lot of talk about soil and people trying to move away from that in feed because of worries about deforestation and other environmental impact. How are we doing on that now?

In terms of trying to encourage locally grown protein sources, I mean there are quite a number of initiatives. I mean we certainly need a bit more traction in that area. I mean the National Farmer’s Union (NFU) has got their sustainable protein action plan, which is obviously there and designed to help encourage your local production of protein crops in terms of pulses. You know peas and beans and so forth, but I think that you know the real politic of this is that we're importing two and a half million tonnes of soil at 48% protein. Peas and beans come in at around 25% protein, so we would be looking if we were to replace soil for around 5 million tonnes of peas and beans. Well, we're not expecting to have that overnight and we would have to ask where we're going to get the land from anyway, but I think that the whole thing needs to be put into a national protein strategy as part of a national land use strategy. We’ve got to get a bit more serious about feed security, because obviously that impacts food security.”