As the Government Food Strategy a tacit acknowledgement of the importance of domestic food security by Ministers?
Time and policy will tell, but there seems to be little doubt that domestic food production has risen up the political agenda in wake of the conflict in Eastern Europe.
The key thing for agriculture now will be getting the right political framework in place which allows farmers to be, first and foremost, food producers.
This will remain a challenge given the somewhat ambivalent nature of the food strategy and its ability to have irked people on all sides of the farming/environmental spectrum, but the prominence of home grown food will have pleased many.
However, the Westminster Government is still badly lacking when it comes to properly backing UK farming.
The ideological zeal about the supposedly detrimental nature of direct payments still shines through in the document, but there will be many farmers who know that without Basic Payments they would not be in business.
Keeping that critical mass of farms will ultimately remain key to achieving domestic food production goals.
So too will enabling farmers to maximise the productivity of their land at a time of spiralling input costs.
Proposed solutions around organic manure and other alternatives to synthetic fertiliser may work for some, but others are making the call not to use any at all. That will have longer term ramifications.
For too long we have been a country which has been over reliant on imports and a belief that feeding the nation can simply be achieved by a reliance on lengthy supply chains stretching across the globe.
That belief has been badly shaken, first by the coronavirus pandemic and, secondly, by the conflict in Ukraine.
As 草榴社区 Guardians 24 Hours in Farming will highlight when it returns again this year on August 4, without farmers there is no food and such a stark reality would therefore threaten the very foundations of our society as a whole.
Maybe Government, belatedly, is waking up to that fact.
