This Christmas Day, 96% of the UK’s 110,000 farmers will be working while millions of families come together for the festive period. Few people realise just how much work goes in to putting Christmas dinner on our tables. Farmers work year round to feed the nation and have to overcome huge challenges to deliver the festive feast we all enjoy.

This video is a thank you to our farmers for feeding the nation.

Ronan Hughes, Managing Director of Agrii says: “Few people realise just how much work goes in to putting Christmas dinner on our tables. Farmers work year round to feed the nation and have to overcome huge challenges to deliver the festive feast we all enjoy.

“It’s important we recognise the importance of farmers to the nation’s food security. The combination of the weather, disease and wider geopolitical forces has put immense pressures on farmers to deliver this year and, in many instances, yields and profits are down at farms across the UK.

“Despite this, our farmers will once again be out preparing to feed us in 2024 while we are sitting down together on Christmas day. This video is a simple and small gesture to thank farmers for all they do and to also hopefully help the public to better appreciate where the food on their plate is coming from.”

The infographic below also helps to illustrate the true scale of British farming’s contribution to Christmas Day and our food security year round.

UK farmers help to produce 10m turkeys, 700,000 tonnes of carrots, 171,000 tonnes of broccoli and cauliflower, 25m Christmas puddings and more than 20m tonnes of cereals for Christmas each year.

This year 4.1m tonnes of potatoes have been produced but this is the lowest ever recorded harvest dues to the wet weather.

A total of 750m sprouts have been grown, but this number has been severely impacted by disease, and 40 million packets of pigs in blankets are also produced.

This number is also drastically down because of Government vet strikes preventing pigs from being processed.