The armistice of 1918 meant that, sooner or later, the huge corn production and inflated costs of agriculture would have to be adjusted to the normal demand for a cheaper, more varied and more nutritious diet – the State did little to help with this painful task of readjustment.

The necessity for some major readjustment in Britain's food supply was aggravated by the postwar policy of the Coalition government. Seeking to maintain high agricultural output at home for strategic reasons, the Agriculture Act 1920 offered guaranteed prices for cereals and greater security of tenure to tenant farmers. Faced with the collapse of wheat prices from the high point of 1920, the government abolished the Ministry of Food on 31 March 1921, and hurriedly introduced the Corn Production (Repeal) Act, 1921, to remove price guarantees and reduce agricultural wages. The Retail Food Prices Index, begun in July 1914 at 100, peaked at 256 in 1920. It fell to 229.5 in 1921 and to 176 in 1922 as arable land began to go out of production. From 12.4M acres in 1918, the area of arable fell below 10M acres in 1929. The 1920s therefore began with falling food prices, a trend that continued for most of the interwar period. As the policy of free trade came under question, the Linlithgow Committee carried out an extensive survey of the nation’s food supply. A temporary sugar-beet subsidy was introduced in 1925 and a system of distinguishing home-grown produce – the National Mark Scheme – was tried. The campaign by the Empire Marketing Board to stimulate milk consumption in the hope of improving markets for dairy farmers was another attempt to stabilize agriculture. In spite of these efforts, domestic agriculture faced collapse as Britain reverted to the pre-1914 pattern of importing a large part of its food supplies:

In 1930, this country, with less than 3 per cent of the world's population, took about 99 per cent of the world's exports of bacon and hams, 96 per cent of the eggs, 59 per cent of the beef, 46 per cent of the cheese, 32 per cent of the wool, and 28 per cent of the wheat and wheat flour.