‘Farming is a form of manufacturing,” says Sir James Dyson, “I want to make things.” The famous inventor has said it often, actually, but as we talk, I can look out of his window and literally see what he means.

I am his guest in an austere modern office at the heart of Dyson Farms, in Carrington, Lincolnshire. In the same complex, producing a cow-like smell, is one of his two enormous anaerobic digesters (ADs), which provide much of the energy for his operation. They generate the equivalent of the electricity used by 10,000 homes. Anything not used on the farms is sold into the national grid. The “digestate” (waste) from the ADs then makes good fertiliser. The buzz phrase is “circular farming”.

In my mouth is one of Dyson’s tasty winter strawberries, a growing part of the 750 tonnes a year he produces, supplying them to M&S. The 72 kilometres of glasshouse pipes are heated by the neighbouring AD.

Hard by is the glasshouse, so large that the best way to travel through it is on the little electric scooters provided. After our sandwich lunch, I watch prototype robots attempt to pick the strawberries. They don’t do it right yet, their colour recognition being confused by the LED lighting, says Sir James. Eventually, however, they will be able to work, unlike human beings, day and night. The picking trolleys will be run on autonomous vehicles from glasshouse to packhouse.

In all, Dyson Farms have bought 36,000 English acres. In Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Somerset, they concentrate on beef and sheep. In their 29,000 acres of Lincolnshire, it is all arable, mainly wheat, barley, peas and the strawberries. It has cost £400 million to buy the land and £120 million so far on improvements.

There is literally no one else in Britain who could operate on this scale, but this does not mean Dyson’s example is a rich man’s folly, irrelevant to real farming. Just as Jeremy Clarkson has done farmers a favour by showing the public the problems they face, so Sir James is giving them hope, by showing that the production of British food can have a bright technological future.

“The romantic in me wants to save, protect and nurture as much English farmland as possible,” he has written; the entrepreneur in him believes this is compatible with profit. He wants to make farming less dependent on the middleman, less vulnerable to supermarket power, readier to develop its own brands and sell them direct.

The Dyson approach is arrestingly different from the trend of most public policy. The Government now insists that farmers should receive what it calls “public money for public goods”.

These goods are defined non-agriculturally. Huge pressure groups, the RSPB and the National Trust, which also own great tracts of land, want rewilding, “restored habitat”, allowing rivers to return to “a more natural state”, etc. The RSPB’s slogan “Giving Nature a Home” is obediently taken up by Defra, which does not properly acknowledge that farming is itself a home for nature. The new incentives for farmers and landowners will, in effect, punish the production of food.

Although concern for the environment is laudable, it is a strange idea that food production is not a public good. Civilisation came into being only when food production had achieved reasonable sophistication and security. It would collapse if these were seriously undermined. Food (and water) are really the first of all public goods, the sine qua non.

We know, from the high quality of much of our land and the beneficent results of our agricultural revolution, that Britain – particularly England – can produce food very well. Hence all those old jokes about roast beef and those sheaves of corn proudly decorating so many pubs and other buildings.

Ours was the first generally well-fed population in history. What makes us assume that we can let that go and rely on the rest of the world? Even the most ardent student of the habitat of the natterjack toad or the shrill carder bee still needs his lunch.

If land is well suited to food production, it is moral to employ it for that purpose. It might even, in some circumstances, be immoral not to do so. Why is it good to harness the natural power of wind and sun to produce energy, but frowned on to harvest the natural fruits of our fertile little bit of the earth?

To do this successfully requires husbandry. In modern times, this in turn requires science and technology. Using drones and computer mapping, marsh harrier nests in the Dyson fields can be identified and skirted round. One of the best means of attacking crop pests on the Dyson estates is to spray them with tiny mites that kill them rather than with chemicals. The pollination the farms monitor in order to improve crop yields.

In his famous dictionary, Dr Johnson defined “husbandry” in three ways – “Tillage; manner of cultivating land”, “Thrift; frugality; parsimony” and “Care of domestick affairs”. That is a helpful trio. It makes the link to agriculture, emphasises the good, economical use of what you have, and reminds you that the work starts at home. The Dyson model of husbandry is the 21st-century version of this 18th-century formulation.

The modern environmental movement is, in part, a justifiable reaction to the abuse of humanity’s power over nature. Too often, though, it draws the impossibilist conclusion that human beings must just pull out completely – or even, in the most extreme version, drop dead.

Paradoxically, such attitudes flourish only in countries so rich that they assume their survival is automatic. Just as the West’s victory in the Cold War lulled it into thinking that threats to the free way of life had forever disappeared, so our globalised ability to increase material prosperity has led us to think that all goods, including food, can just keep on coming.

With the decline of a sense of threat came a lack of vigilance for security. What need of military defence, or indigenous supplies of fossil fuels, or growing our own food, if we thought what we needed would always be available from somewhere?

In this century, there have been repeated shocks to this complacency. The events of 11 September 2001 showed that low-technology terrorism could hit the greatest power on earth hard. The financial crash of 2008-9 found us being made to save our banks, rather than the other way round. The rise of China has showed how weak and easily infiltrated our elite institutions have become.

In trade and manufacture, the attractive EU notion of “just in time” supply chains turned out to work only if international relations were in good order. The current energy crisis, caused partly by post-Covid supply issues and partly by the punitive demands of net zero, exposes how we have thrown away our former energy security.

We are in for a similar shock if we turn away from producing our own food. It won’t be much fun watching reintroduced beavers or wolves if we do not know where our next meal is coming from.

“I hate subsidies,” says Sir James Dyson. He believes they always distort commercial decisions. But if our Government subsidises only environmentalism and competing countries continue to subsidise agricultural production, British food producers are stuffed. In his memoirs, he ends his chapter on farming thus: “I simply can’t bear to think of English agriculture going the same way as British manufacturing.”