Amid sunflowers and grasses wafting gently in the Lincolnshire breeze, the man who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner gestures around surrounding fields to highlight the latest in farming technology. On a bright summer's day, Sir James Dyson barely stops for breath: the future of farming, he enthuses, will centre on research, science and “developing new ways of doing things, [creating] new machines”. As such, expertise built around consumer durables, and the new world of artificial intelligence (AI), will prove transformative in reworking the land to achieve a goal central to the country's resilience, yet side-lined by successive governments: greater self-sufficiency in food.

“We should be growing our own food; we shouldn't be importing it … terribly important,” insists Dyson, warming to a theme which you might think is – but, alarmingly, is not – a top priority for government. ‘We shouldn't give up …’ Yet, up to now, it seems that – shamefully – governments have. We grow barely 60% of our own food.

The engineer-turned-inventor and multi-billionaire points over a hedgerow, in a short film, to 15 acres of six-metre-high glasshouses stretching as far as the eye can see: protection for the first strawberries, with other fruit to follow, bucking the seasons with a crop ready for market in November and March. Nearby, two power plants, known as anaerobic digesters – fed on maize from surrounding fields, rather than from organic waste – provide the energy for one of the country's largest farming operations.

Sir James has already turned some of his 35,000 acres into a high-tech enterprise, using the latest gadgetry to boost food production and, he insists, to encourage biodiversity; drones filming and sending the latest information on crop and ground conditions to data analysts; large, self-guided, satellitelinked tractors with multi-screen cabs more like aircraft cockpits either ploughing ultra-precise furrows or assisting machinery harvesting peas (of which Dyson is the country's largest producer) potatoes, spring barley or wheat, for instance.