UK wheat yields have stalled for three decades, but last year delivered the starkest warning yet.
Production of bread-making wheat fell to a ten-year low, and despite the best grain quality for twenty years, most samples still failed to meet milling standards.
When a nation’s most fundamental food staple becomes this unpredictable, the fallout hits every level of the supply chain. For farmers, it means eroding yields and uncertain returns. For the wider food industry, it triggers higher production costs, a deeper reliance on imported grain, and more market volatility.
Wheat is the UK’s biggest crop, and seed genetics are one of the most powerful tools shaping what it delivers. New varieties advance to market every year, but they haven’t translated into national productivity gains. Something is going wrong.
The Red Queen hypothesis
A live example of the challenge is the national breakdown of the yellow rust resistance gene Yr15.
Yellow rust is caused by a wind-borne fungus, which quickly spreads during the wheat growing season. Infection can severely impact wheat harvests for susceptible varieties.
The best defence against yellow rust infection is to grow wheat varieties containing genes that provide innate genetic resistance to the fungus.
However, a new strain of the pathogen has overcome a key resistance gene that was protecting many major UK wheat varieties from yellow rust infection.
Scientists from the John Innes Centre estimate half of today’s wheat hectarage is now susceptible to this major yield-limiting and ubiquitous pathogen.
This evolutionary arms race between rust and wheat is itself an example of what evolutionary biologists call the Red Queen hypothesis: two species locked in constant co-evolution, each having to keep changing to hold its position. The rust cycles several times a season. Wheat, even with a breeder’s help, gets one chance a year. Crop improvement is not a fair game.
The hypothesis was named after Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass. She could be summarising UK wheat production today with the line: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that”.
And then there’s climate change.
Across the country, fields that only six months ago were submerged in winter floods are now scorched. Some spring crops have seen no rainfall in the entire season. Winter crops are being harvested earlier than ever. The yield shortfall is tracking to be the worst since 1984 with a cost to farms of up to £390 million in lost harvest. In turn, this will increase reliance on imports from overseas.
Looking ahead, the UK is entering a new era of food insecurity. CADI (Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index) predicts that without adaptation, farmland in East Anglia, the UK’s breadbasket, will lose 10-25% of its productive potential by 2040.
Fixing the UK’s food sovereignty gap
It’s widely acknowledged that the UK relies on imports for its food security – an unsafe fallback. Trade routes get disrupted and export bans imposed at short notice. But there is a vulnerability running one level deeper – into the tools that make domestic production possible in the first place.
The genetics underpinning British wheat are largely owned and decided overseas. The country’s top-selling bread-making and animal feed varieties are owned by KWS, Limagrain, and RAGT, which are German and French companies. While these organisations are doing vital work breeding in the UK to provide today’s most popular varieties, the commercial reality is that these isles are one geography in a much larger global catalogue.
When an attribute matters a great deal for British growers and less elsewhere, be it our maritime climate, our disease pressures, or our quality specification, they are competing for attention in someone else’s programme. For example, in 2025, one of the world’s largest seed multinationals, Syngenta, closed its Cambridgeshire wheat breeding operation after more than 35 years. While it will still supply the UK, it is consolidating cereal breeding into mainland Europe.
In the same way that it is too risky for a nation to outsource its energy grid or defence infrastructure, the UK cannot afford to lose control of the genetic baseline of its primary food supply. New champions need to take on the challenge of delivering for growers here, making on-the-ground decisions about varieties that can solve local problems.
Changing how we play the game
Recent technological advances have transformed what is possible in crop improvement. Applying AI to make sense of plant genomes, coupled with targeted gene edits, means that plant genomes can now be read and rewritten directly. A desirable genetic change that would otherwise take a decade of crossing and selection can be introduced into the crop in a single generation, bringing additional genetic diversity into breeding programmes. We have the biological equivalent of a time machine, emerging when time is most limited.
But technology is not enough in isolation. We need to build great products that deliver both yield and quality on the farm and beyond it.
This is why Wild Bioscience acquired F1 Seed Ltd to build a new, integrated seeds business. Bringing together the best of breeding with our AI and editing capabilities, we can accelerate the nascent field of precision breeding to develop varieties with better agronomic performance, environmental profiles, and quality characteristics.
Alongside technology and business drive, innovation needs a sandbox. England has taken the lead in building one. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 created a regulatory framework in England that supports the development of technologies that make precise changes to the genome which could have been achieved by conventional breeding given enough time.
Furthermore, as the European Union actively moves towards its own New Genomic Techniques (NGT) framework, England’s lead in precision breeding serves as a natural launch pad to start local and scale varieties across the continent, flipping where the UK sits in the crop innovation queue.
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice doesn’t win by running faster and faster, she wins by making chess moves instead. It’s only by changing the game that she’s playing that she can finally make progress. Realising the potential of precision breeding to accelerate crop improvement is how we change the game we’re playing, break through the yield and quality plateau, and address the UK’s food sovereignty gap.