england

England Wants 10% Organic Farmland by 2036. NZ Is at 0.6%

England has a shortage of its own organic food and a new ten-year plan to fix it. New Zealand has the opposite problem, a rulebook, and no number. What the English plan actually promises, what it leaves out, and where New Zealand stands.

Photo by Charles Lamb / Unsplash

On 14 October the UK government published the Organic Action Plan for England. It sets an ambition to lift the share of England's farmland managed organically from around 3.4 percent towards 10 percent by 2036.

New Zealand's certified organic land sits at 0.6 percent of farmland, according to the 2025 OANZ Market Report.

England is starting from 3.4 percent. We are at 0.6. England has just decided its number isn't enough.

England's problem is that people want more than it grows

The plan is blunt about why it exists. UK organic retail sales reached £3.9 billion in 2025, and the market grew 4.2 percent in the year before.

English farmers aren't keeping up. England's organic area has sat between 2.7 and 3.5 percent of farmland since 2012, the plan says, and grew just 1.5 percent last year.

So the shortfall is filled from overseas. The plan says the trade gap in organic goods is widening, particularly in horticulture.

Shoppers want it. The farms aren't there. That is the whole problem England is trying to solve.

New Zealand has the mirror image. Our organic sector was worth a record $1.18 billion, and $606.7 million of that was exports, per the OANZ report. England can't grow enough organic food for its own people. We grow ours and put most of it on a boat.

What's actually in it

The plan was written jointly by Defra and the English Organic Forum, a group of organic organisations, and the two will oversee it together, according to Defra's own announcement.

It runs on three themes: more supply, matching that supply to demand, and building demand through shoppers and public buyers.

Some of the actions are the slow plumbing you'd expect from a 22-page government PDF. Clearer information for farmers thinking about converting. One-to-one advice through the conversion. Growth plans for horticulture, arable, dairy, red meat and poultry.

One is new. Defra will try to set up an Organic Observatory, a body that would regularly publish import and export volumes, production by commodity, land converting, price gaps and buying trends. England is admitting it doesn't currently have the numbers to manage the thing it wants to grow.

The most interesting part is public food. The plan points to Bury, in Lancashire, where all 56 council schools hold Food for Life Served Here Gold certification, which requires more than 25 percent of food spend to be organic. The plan says the programme saved money while buying more organic food.

The first commodities England wants pushed into public menus are milk, cereals and seasonal vegetables.

What isn't in it

Money.

The plan doesn't announce a new fund. It says it is designed to sit alongside the existing Sustainable Farming Incentive, which already pays for organic conversion and maintenance, and to tackle the barriers that "funding alone cannot remove".

That existing funding has been rocky. Wicked Leeks reports that the September Sustainable Farming Incentive window closed within hours of opening, and that the Soil Association's policy director called it "shambolic".

The 10 percent is also worded carefully. The plan calls it an "ambition", not a target.

England has been here before

This is not England's first organic action plan. Defra published one in 2002, in the middle of an organic boom, and it wasn't kept up as a living strategy, according to the Organic Research Centre.

In 2024 the Soil Association said that earlier plan helped organic farmland in England peak in 2008, and that it then fell by around 30 percent to about 3 percent.

A plan on paper moved the number once. Letting the plan lapse moved it back.

Where New Zealand sits

New Zealand does have an organic strategy. OANZ published the Organic Sector Strategy 2022 after workshops with more than 300 people, and thanks MPI for funding it. It is the sector's document, not the government's, and it carries no government land target.

What the government has built is the rulebook. The Organic Products and Production Act became law on 5 April 2023, and the organic standards come into force on 31 March 2028, according to MPI. That work matters. It is what finally makes the word "organic" mean something on a New Zealand label, and it is what our exporters need to keep access to Europe.

But a rulebook says what counts as organic. It doesn't say how much of it we want.

When Associate Minister for Organics Mike Butterick launched the latest consultation in August, he framed the sector around its $1.18 billion value and more than $606 million in exports. Responding to OANZ's election manifesto, he linked the sector's goals to lifting productivity and export value, Dairy News reported.

That manifesto has five asks. The fifth is more support for farmers converting, and organic food in schools and hospitals, as I covered in August. England has just put both of those in a government plan. Here they sit at the bottom of a lobby group's list.

None of this means New Zealand should copy England. England has a shortage. We have a surplus we sell offshore. The useful lesson is narrower. England wrote down a number, and said who answers for it.