Home: Food 2030
A number of challenges are facing the food system – rising population, diminishing natural resources and climate change. Alongside these, diet-related ill health continues to put a burden on the economy and society. These web pages provide an opportunity to discuss the challenges and other issues affecting the food system. They also provide a place to discuss the shape of the future food system. Food 2030 looks both at the food we produce and consume in the UK, and how global food production can be increased in a sustainable way.
We would like to hear your views on these issues so that we can make the food system better for the economy, for our environment and for our health and wellbeing. This forum will stay open until 16 October 2009. See About Food 2030 for information about how we will use your comments, also information about the project background.
Alongside Food 2030 we have also published:
- A ‘one-year-on’ progress report on Food Matters;
- The UK Food Security Assessment; and
- A consultation on a draft set of sustainable food indicators.
In this video, Hilary Benn speaks about the challenges of secure and sustainable food supply.
Update: 16 October 2009
The Food 2030 consultation is now closed. Thank you for all your contributions whether through this website, by e-mail or at meetings that we’ve attended. We are analysing all your comments which will be fed into our food strategy which we aim to publish early next year.
The comments function has been disabled across the forum, so you can no longer leave comments on the website.
You can still contact us by e-mail using the address on the contacts page. However, we cannot promise to consider any submissions sent by e-mail.
Thanks again for all your comments,
Food 2030 Team, 16th October 2009
Wonderful to hear (BBC Radio 4) and see on this site acknowledgement of the destructive effect of intense farming on soil fertility. For 30 years I have been warning about the effect of deep ploughing, nitrogen fertiliser and monoculture on farms in both temperate and marginal zones. This system has reached the peak of its stimulating capacity on yields in the west; the attempt to tranfer it to marginal zones – e.g. North Africa, Middle East – has failed and has ruined many previously fertile areas and been responsible for tremendous waste of aid funds. There is a farming system, based on rotations of self-regenerating annual clovers, that enables farmers to produce cereals and food grains, and graze animals. Shallow cultivation (ploughing) is only necessary when grain is sown. Animals graze on pasture and the pasture returns nitrogen to the soil. This system is well proven and will increase production in marginal and dry zones, protect soil from erosion and increase soil fertility. The temperate zones need to adopt this too, but the increases of production (proven) that can take place in the marginal zones are where food production can be increased significantly. The system also costs much less to operate.
Economists and scientists have been the drivers of intensive agricultural systems but we need to consider the farming system and its effect on the soil – something badly neglected when computer modelling, statistics, plant breeding and research plots are allowed to dominate agricultural policy.
The challenges of climate change and famine are real – the whole world needs food security – so please remember that without fertile soil and a sustainable farming system we will all starve.
Today DEFRA has today announced for improving our soils. The only practical way to do that is a return to mixed farming where livestock are kept and grass leys capture carbon and build up humus. For that to happen we need to have a market for much more livestock products, i.e. meat and milk. It is the vegetarian lobby that is working against the improvement of our soils.
Oh for goodness’ sake…. Let’s not let this discussion degenerate into an ‘us vs them’ argument pitting vegans/vegetarians against those who eat meat. That is a dead end, and very boring. Nobody in this country is going to tolerate the government or anyone else for that matter forcing an extreme diet on them, whether or not it is good for the environment/food supply/soil quality. For heavens’ sake, we won’t even give up our cars, so it’s surely asking the impossible to ask us to give up our hamburgers.
This is getting badly off the point: we started by talking about how we improve the amount of food we grow/produce ourselves.
For example: at the moment we grow a paltry 10% of our own fruit: probably mainly because we’ve grown used to eating bananas and oranges every day without a thought to the fact that they’ve been shipped thousands of miles. If we ate seasonally, we would be enjoying apples from August to March, and gooseberries, rhubarb and currants from March to August.
I believe a premium, and a very high one at that, should be imposed on goods shipped in from a long way away, so that bananas and oranges become luxury goods, not everyday items. That would concentrate everyone’s minds on what they eat, and when.
Well said Sally (White)…best comment yet.
I feel that we import too much food from overseas which is costly to the environment and much nutritional goodness is lost along the way. It is essential that we improve our farm land at home by improving the soil using organic principals. We should be investing in sustainable farming and encouraging people to grow some of their own food. More & more front gardens are vanishing under concrete, if this was actively discouraged more land would be available for people to grow their own food. Instead of selling school playing fields to housing developers perhaps the land could be converted to growing space instead.
Well said (again) Sally White. I imagine a Vegan/Vegetarian group has posted the DEFRA link to it’s members. And it was quite a good idea except that it gives us an unbalanced picture.
As time is getting shorter for comments, anyone who is part of general consumer group interested in the future of food in the UK, might perhaps do the same – post the link to members and sensible friends. We need a cross section of views (not an angry one!) – with as many comments from mainstream consumers as possible, as these (we) will be most effected and can perhaps effect most too.
Hello,
I live in a small town in the midlands, & thanks to supermarkets we do not even have a local green grocers any more.
On the surface this would not amount to much of a problem, but if you look at the area that the store building takes up I am sure there could easily be a reasonable sized farm, then look at the car parking area, another farm, then all the road that leads to the “retail park”, another farm.
So I feel we should begin with the freeing up of space.
Then we can have a wander down the aisles of our supermarkets, how many suppliers of baked beans do we need? & how many of every other consumable we find?
1 of each suits me fine.
And what of the carbon emissions of all this unnecessary “choice” we see before us?
The way I see it, economics & marketing is snuffing us all …I would gladly be proved wrong though (in other words sock it to me).
& tell me the image of people on bicycles with baskets of fresh produce is not a pleasant one.
TTFN
Solutions, that’s all we need.
Somehow we have to cut through the vested interests standing in the way of resolving this massive problem.
Sorry if people think that objecting to allowing meat produced from grains and proteins is akin to vegetarianism, and therefore an invalid argument, because they are wrong.
The world, from our perspective in the UK, may not appear to be short of oil, water or artificial fertilisers, but it most assuredly is.
Accounting for all the stages of non-grazing meat production, each quarter pounder sold in a burger joint requires 450 litres of water to enable its purchase. Every pound of meat sold as beef, and not reared on grass alone, requires about 10kg of grains and proteins to produce 1kg of bovine meat. These equations are clearly madness, and in a world shortage cannot be allowed to continue. This is not an argument about being vegetarian or not. It’s just plain common sense, and it’s down to every one of us to adjust our diet accordingly.
And before anyone suggests it, no, we won’t have a bunch of pasty faced malnourished people to cope with. What we will have is a significant reduction in obesity, and a major improvement in the health of people in neighbouring some massive cutbacks in NHS budgets. Surely a goal worth chasing?
What we all had to also do is to beat some of the commercial interests away, and promote a commonsensical approach to delivering solutions to one of the most critical problems mankind faces.
An idea that could appeal to the government would be to implement one vegan day a week as a way to help curb global warming, respond to future food crisis and use the planet’s resources sparingly. Of course, everyone would be free to adopt it or not, but the government could explain the benefits and encourage citizens to do it. There could be informative activities (cooking, health workshops) around it with city halls, businesses, etc.
It would be a gentle way to save water, reduce greenhouse gas emissions (especially methane) and other pollution.
Lynne
I am curious that you promote a farming system that you say “is well proven”. How given your aversion to “computer modelling, statistics, plant breeding and research plots” was the efficacy of this sytem proven? The problem of imposing western farming systems onto parts of the world where they are unsuitable (which you have highlighted) has arrisen not because ‘computer modelling, statistics, plant breeding and research plots’ were used to test these systems out first, but quite the opposite. That people knew they were ‘proven’ and so imposed them without proper research first. The last thinkng we need now is to be applying farming systems or products, such as bichar, that are going to ‘solve all our problems’ without properly investingating them first.
Sally
Your idea about transporting food long distances is correct, except from the perspective of the small scale banana farmer living on the Windward Islands (or wherever). Who is suddenly going to find he has no market for his bananas, so no money, so can’t send his children to school. He could convert his farm to growing produce and selling it locally, but he won’t get much money from that as since the banana trade stopped there is less money on the island and ….. Things are not always as black and white as they seem. Even the issue of importing, for instance, potatoes from Austria or onions from Spain is not an easy one. How do you stop it and were do you draw the line, why stop at food? Even the organic movement has failed to grasp this nettle, something the proponents of organic farming on this discussion board have conveniently ignored.
Paul, I appreciate your concerns, but you’re also forgetting that your farmer in the Windward Islands has in fact got a massive market just to the north: in fact, a much more massive market than little old Britain. The United States and Canada are surely more sensible places for banana farmers to sell their bananas to than Europe, thousands of miles away, in this carbon-compromised world.
And anyway, I’m not arguing that we don’t ship bananas to the UK: just that we pay the proper price for doing so.
Hello Again,
With regards to Oliver Dowding’s very informative post I feel compelled to enquire about this part:
Every pound of meat sold as beef, and not reared on grass alone, requires about 10kg of grains and proteins to produce 1kg of bovine meat.
Indeed the math is shocking but logical, but I have to ask what is the solution here? – remove cows from the planet?
TTFN
Sally
I deliberately chose the Windward Islands because banana production there is mostly from small farmers who supply to the EU while the US gets most of its bananas supplied by large corporations with vast plantations in Central America. The farmers on the Windwards are protected from the full force of competition by EU policies, which the US corporations have tried to have ruled illegal. So the poor farmers of the Caribbean can’t compete. If we decide to get our bananas somewhere else such as West Africa, incidentally a similar distance by sea, poor people in poor countries will suffer. The point I was making was that decisions we make to not import food have consequences elsewhere, it is not a painless solution.
Paul:
OK I see what you were getting at, though I do wonder what proportion of the bananas we eat here are from the Windward Islands, and whether that proportion justifies a policy based on helping the farmers in those particular islands.
But I would also like to fire it back at you and say, a policy of allowing bananas from the Windward Islands to be sold at the same sort of prices as domestically produced fruit (if not cheaper) undermines the domestic fruit market to the point where thousands of farmers in this country have already gone out of business, to say nothing of the hundreds of ancient orchards which have been grubbed up as uneconomic and the thousands of ancient apple, pear, plum and damson varieties which have been lost forever.
I would say that a policy of cheap imports also has a painful price for someone to pay, wouldn’t you?
to Paul – The proof of the farming system I described is in Australia where wheat and sheep production using this system has been used sustainably and productively for over 100 years. Computer modelling, research plots and statistics have been used by development agencies to justify and to impose a high cost, nitrogen fertiliser, deep ploughing system on dryland farming zones that has failed. Farm projects and farmer adoption of the Australian system in dryland zones in North Africa and the Middle East have provided ample proof that a pasture/cereal rotation is the appropriate system for these conditions. Barriers to this are entrenched international devevelopment agencies that are dominated by bureaucrats and technocrats who know little about practical farming and almost nothing about dryland farming. (See “Dryland Farming” Cambridge University Press for data etc.)
I agree with you about bichar etc – and regret that a senior adviser suggested that GPS on tractors would help solve the problems of chemical fertilisers and inappropriate ploughing. As always, proposing a doubtful trivial detail rather than facing up to the fundamental mistake of an ultimately destructive farming system.
The government should be supporting allotments and small scale community food production projects. I have been on a waiting list for an allotment two years. I live in a large city and hear stories of people waiting over five years for a plot.
While I realise that growing our own food at home will not, alone, solve the problems of food security and sustainability, it is certainly a step in the right direction. An increased connection with where our food comes from and what is seasonally available will change attitudes and encourage us to really value food.
Demand for allotments is at an all time high with an estimated 100, 000 people on waiting lists across the country. If the government focussed on this issue, land, including small parcels of land in urban areas, could be put to use by local people to grow their own food.
Please can we have definitive decisions on the objectives of our management of our land!
I suggest
1) Conservation of SUFFICIENT habitats to ensure the preservation of species. ( I believe this is best done in a managed network of reserves rather than haphazard incentives to land owners)
2) Conservation of high productivity land
( I believe it is perverse to build on grade 2 land and to preserve low productivity moorlands, subject to 1 above)
3) Conserve a FEW modest areas of natural beauty, Though many areas or poor land are naturally unattractive to develop anyway!
4) Encourage the research, development and deployment of sustainable high yield food production.
5) Manage consumer expectations towards matching the availability of food varieties. (Meat from Hill farms IS sustainable!)
Only once the objectives are agreed can one truly manage and plan!
The New Noah
Idea: New Build Houses ALSO have land set aside for Allotment use
I too was on a waiting list for 5 years before I got my allotment which I absolutely love – apparently I am one of the lucky ones at just 5 years!!!.
Anyway, the idea is to “encourage” or “make” building companies designate a plot of land for allotment use each time they build a new housing estate.
The size of the allocated land could be proportioned in some way to the size of the housing estate.
I am sure this idea has been mentioned before and I got this idea from my local allotment officer when we were having a chat about allotment “stuff”.
Needless to say that an allotment – or having a bit of land to grow “stuff” – isn’t just simply about growing “stuff” but has far greater benefits to your own physical and mental health, meeting people and generally getting out there and, err, doing, “stuff”.
Also, brown sites should be looked at (again an old idea) BUT what about encouraging Farmers to “rent” out parts of their land or is this a no-go idea.
Any Farmers got any comments or ideas
All the best
Jerry from Cramlington
We have lots of old grassland but no means of knowing how much phosphate we really need, given the assumption that the mycorhiza will extract more nutrient than new grassland. There are three soil tests one using two alternative agents. All give different answers and so are almost useless for these circumstances.Not only does the answer offer cost savings but if phosphate pollution was reduced that would be another benefit as it is almost impossible to strip out as is nitrogen.
I have grave concerns over the exhaustive methods used by large scale commercial farming.
Like all aspects of human life, we use too much, waste too much and think too little. We believe that we know better than nature. That we can tweak, interupt and by-pass the complex inter-relationships that arise from natural systems. The entire world needs to very quickly re-think every aspect of our day.
In my opinion, the only sustainable option is the natural option. It is difficult to contemplate the damage we have already done to each and every eco-system on this planet.
On the topic of farming, we must move toward a full Organic food network very quickly. However we must take similar rapid steps in all other areas. Renewable Energy should be our only energy policy. Re-planting vast areas of native forest is a must. The railway network should be expanded to every corner possible, replacing the ever widening roads, for both passenger and freight traffic.The list is endless.
Quite simply we can worry about how much food we can produce until the cows come home. It’s simply immaterial. Any food production issues that arise are just another pointer towards the unsustainable rate of mankinds expanision. An expansion that has, in the last few decades in particular, been to the detriment of all other species and environments on this planet. Sooner rather than later, it will be us that suffer.
What really saddens me, is that the answers are there and available. Yet only some people are prepared to listen and change. If we all made these changes, our quality of life would increase substantially.
To give some perspective, i’m not a “hippy” or an “eco-warrior”. I’m a 25 year old Accountant, who realised only recently just what a dire state the landscape around me is in.
Where I live there are a lot of gardens which are just lawn and nothing else. One of them used to be next door, but this year we had new neighbours and they now have a very productive vegetable patch. I grow vegetables, though I’m far from self-sufficient, we still do manage to grow most of what we eat in the summer, and have leeks and greens over the winter which are high in nutrients and taste good, not to mention stored stuff from the summer, like garlic and shallots and squashes, and frozen beans. I really notice the difference in what I buy from the supermarket.
At present, gardens are seen as ‘brownfield sites’ and it’s deemed a productive use of land to build on them. But they are a tremendous resource for food security, and a vital tool in avoiding food waste, if people compost (and if you grow vegetables, it’s a great help). Not to mention avoiding the waste that arises, otherwise, before food gets to the shops, the stems of kohlrabi, cabbages, etc. In addition, I think if you grew it yourself you are unlikely to waste it. I think the issue of food waste and food security are linked, in that we currently consume more than we actually eat. This is not a good idea.
Home-grown food, using compost, helps lower our carbon footprint, increases the nutritional value of our diet, makes people see how good vegetables are. I think the trend towards home-grown should be encouraged, and there should be information available to people who want to do it – plus, gardens should be valued as productive land, not brownfield building sites.
paul,
you concede that organic farming has a lot to recommend it. I agree that the fact it still allows the use of copper, rather less harmful modern alternatives, as a fungicide is anachronistic and regrettable.
what we need is a regulated system of farming that one might describe as “organic enough” . I do believe that the rules of organic production would be a good template for DEFRA to study when imposing much needed regulation on an over permissive and wasteful industry. although clearly not perfect, they are pointing to a day when us humans will show some reverence to fact that we are, even if against our will, part of the natural order.
the arguments about benefits and risks of bio-technology is a smoke-screen. GM is about the power of multinationals to impose patent law on a life-form and make a huge amount of money for their use in further ‘technology’, with massive potential to cause grief and very little to recommend it.
to leave the world a better place, call me dogmatic if you like, we need to remember to respect nature and use technology very gently for it has enormous destructive potential. Who is going to save us from our pride and arrogance if not ourselves?
Lynne
Interesting web site. However, I don’t think that the repeated failure of the medic system can be placed at the door of agricultural research. It looks more like a failure of the ideal of large scale development. Trying to impose a whole new farming system onto a country overnight is never going to work. Changes to agriculture are generally evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Just look at how slowly zero till has been taken up in the semi-arid western USA, despite all the resources going into that. Indeed perhaps if a more traditional approach of going from plot to field to farm had been taken maybe some of the problems with the medic system could have been identified and addressed when things were still small scale.
In defence of DEFRA, research they commission at the applied end now always includes an outreach/extension element and they have even dabbled in the participatory approach in some projects.
Sally
The important number is not the proportion of bananas we eat that come from the Windward Islands, but what proportion they produce comes to the EU. But bananas are a bit of a side issue as we can’t produce them here. The problem with the local versus imported argument is that a) its not a simple case of local is always best b) to legislate for this would be a nightmare (as I said, it’s a nettle even the supposedly sustainable organic sector has failed to grasp). c) I really don’t want a bureaucrat in Brussels deciding that I can’t have one variety of apple because there are some in the UK but I can have some other variety because there are none in the UK. I can imagine the bureaucracy surrounding such a scheme would produce more carbon dioxide and prove more wasteful that any amount of trans-national movement of food.
Paul
Peter Dawe is providing some practical options and I would like to add to the list. We need to accept that the 20th century was the age of energy extravagance. It was thought to be easier to centrally heat houses rather than insulate them. Farming was no exception and carbon based energy became the driving force for the huge expansion in production. It would be romantic to believe that we can return to the age of horse drawn agriculture but we can, using the house analogy, improve insulation and find sustainable energy sources.
My list would include:-
* Eliminate nitrogen fertilisers on pastures. Nitrogen fertilisers are made using large amounts of energy and their use releases even more green house gases. Pastures based on clovers and grass produce about 70% of those using grass and heavy applications of nitrogen. While output is lower so are costs and of course the environmental impact is much lower. Such a chage is not easy as a whole generation of farmers has grown up addicted to nitrogen fertiliser.
* Feed less grain the cattle. Grain feeding should be reserved for pigs and poultry as they are efficient converters. Dairy and beef cattle and sheep should have clover and grass pastures as their main feed source of nutrition. One of the major obstacle to such a change is that dairy cattle have been bred to require high-energy grain feed.
* Cereal rotations should be changes to include more legume crops such as peas, beans, lentils etc. These would require no nitrogen fertiliser and would provide a small amount of nitrogen for the following cereal crop. These crops are more difficult to grow and to harvest than cereals so farmers would need to learn new skills.
Turning this wish list into reality requires some hard and soft incentives. If the carbon trading scheme succeeds in pushing up the price of carbon on a sustained basis this will flow through to higher prices for nitrogen fertiliser but given the lobbying power of farmers in Europe this could be offset by a new round of subsidies. Using the single farm payment would be a better means of providing price signals. They could be increased for farmers using clover and decreased for farmers using nitrogen fertiliser. The whole package would be payment neutral.
Soft incentives refer to education, training and information on how to farm without high levels of nitrogen fertiliser.
Changing production without changing demand is futile as consumers would merely switch to imports. A diet containing less dairy products, less meat and more grain legumes would be much healthier but how can such changes be achieved? Over the last half century there have been huge changes in the British diet. Vegetable oils have replaced animal fats. Chicken has become the most popular meat. These changes were developed by the food producers and processors. Will they develop new foods based on grain legumes? Could a dal marsala take over from the chicken tikka masala as the national dish of Britain? Will the government support such a campaign? Could such a campaign survive the backlash of parts of the media which brands any public health campaign as the “nanny state”? Why are restrictions on advertising junk food an infringement of our inalienable freedom while the promotion, not enforcement, of a healthy diet by government agencies is the beginning of an authoritarian state?
Sorry about this posting being so long but it could have been longer – those interested might like to look at a chapter on my web site http://www.drylandfarming.org/Misc%20Home%20pages/Nitrogen.html
Paul. if you read the case studies and data you will see that the medic based farming system did not fail. In every country project it achieved its objective – sustainable, low cost, productive pasture and crop. I am delighted to see that DEFRA is beginning to commission at the applied end and includes an outreach/extension element. Even more encouraging that they are “dabbling” in the participatory approach in some projects. I presume this means that they will work with farmers and take them seriously instead of seeing them only as passive receivers. Participatory approach i.e. experienced farmers transferring knowledge to other experienced farmers, backed up by research where indicated, is how the medic farming system was discovered and it succeeded in transference to farms in similar climates and conditions when farmers , experienced in its operations and management, worked with their counterparts.
Plot experiment ignores most of the factors that affect practical farming and to extrapolate from plot experiment alone provides false conclusions and expectations.
Incidentally the medic farming system does not require chemical nitrogen fertiliser – and requires only shallow cultivation when a crop is planted – a pretty good reason for looking at it seriously, don’t you think?
For improved food security, the first thing the government has to do is to take agriculture seriously and invest in it. Discard the politically correct “Defra” and put “agriculture” back into the title of the ministry responsible. Secondly, abolish the system of competitive funding for agricultural and horticultural research and restore a credible career prospect for research workers instead of 3-year contracts. I have seen no evidence that research results have been better under the current system than when directors of agricultural research instututes were given block grants and told to get on with the job. At a stroke, a return to the previous system of funding would enable the elimination of armies of arm-chair scientists who tell the administrators what to fund and of accountants who count the pennies. Finally, food security would be much easier to achieve with fewer people, so adopt tax and aid policies which actively discourage large families and the irresponsible production of unplanned children.
Lynne
I think we are probably singing from the same hymn sheet, though one of us is perhaps singing the soprano line and one the tenor line. The medic systems failed in the sense that they were not adopted. This seemed to be the result of failure of the system to work properly, often because of poor grazing management or failure to adopt appropriate cultivations. I wonder if a more gradual introduction of the system at an increasing scale might have worked better at identifying problems enabling them to be addressed before moving onto the next step. The system as a whole seems an entirely sensible approach to farming in theses regions and the use of legumes as nitrogen sources certainly deserves wider adoption. Indeed people are stating to become more interested in this in pasture systems in the UK as the price of nitrogen fertiliser rises, perhaps its something DEFRA should be promoting more.
Lynne Chatterton
The Medic system is for semi-arid. Is there a similar system for our climate? Norfolk in particular, (Which might be considered semi-arid if your from Manchester!)
Paul, The system did not fail but the problem was that the technocrats and the procurement agencies were not able to cope with a whole farming system and respond to its operational needs. Where farmers had appropriate equipment the system worked effectively, where delays and inadequate resources interfered with farming operations then there were problems. There was no lack of identification of these problems – they were self evident on the ground. The farmers were sabotaged by a lack of practical farming expertise within the funding institutions.
This fundamental problem of policy implementation by non-farming experts can be seen in agricultural departments, agricultural aid projects and food production divisions throughout the world.
If pasture rotations instead of nitrogen and grain feeding of stock are to be encouraged in Britain, this problem will have to be faced.
Hello everybdy, many thanks for your continued comments. This is just a quick message to say that the consultation will be closing in two weeks time.
In the remaining time we really want to focus debate on the discussion topics, the Action Plan and the proposed Food System. Therefore we will be closing this page to comments over the weekend so get in any further general comments quickly. The rest of the site will remain open and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the Food Economy, Climate Change and all the other topics over the next fortnight.
Peter
Medic or lucerne as we call it in Europe can be quiet easily grown in the drier parts of the UK, such as Norfolk. If you pay a visit to your local organic farm, you might find they are using medic as their fertility building crop in a similar system to the dryland farming Lynne promotes, though most organic farmers use clovers rather than medic as they are more suited to our climate and easier to manage in some ways.
Lynne
I don’t think we are too bad at agricultural extension in this country, often the biggest barrier to change is the conservative nature of the farming community. However, because farmers rely on subsidies things can be made to happen if they are tied to subsidy payments.
Hilary Benn says there is no reason why we cannot grow more of our own food, fruit, vegetables cereals, the whole range.
Please then will the Government join up it’s policies and STOP allowing any further housing development on agricultural land. Around Bristol we having planning applications for 30,000 houses that have been submitted to the authorities by ‘Developers’, the majority of which are proposed on greenfield sites. A huge proportion of this land has been used for food production for generations. So a plea to the government not to allow this land, which will be so valuable for food production in the future, to be concreted over.
Once this land is lost there will be no retrieving it for food production in the future.
Peter – look back at UK farming – Norfolk in particular – prior to the 1950s and rediscover the rotations based on pasture that were practised then. Add to that more recent knowledge about hard seed of annual medic and clovers and the way this enables pasture to self-generate after cropping without re-seeding. Although, a word of warning – don’t plough deeper than 10 cm or you will destroy your seed bank. Replacing nitrogen fertiliser with pasture is the objective.
Don’t confuse lucerne with annual medicago and clovers. Lucerne is medicago sativa – but a totally different plant in its growth, water requirement, and root system. It is perennial, not annual and does not survive a crop planted over it.
Paul.
My experience of farmers is that, because they live and work with risk every day, they are much more open to practical, rational changes to their farm operations than technical advisers. It is technocrats who hold farmers back – constrained as they are by theoretical dogmatism. As for subsidies – yes, they do determine farmers’ operations – and look what a mess has been made of farming over the last fifty years thanks to subsidies developed and implemented by a centralised, bureaucratic technocracy. Use subsidies, if you must, to help farmers stop using nitrogen fertiliser and to re-introduce sustainable farm systems. That would be a good use of subsidies. Incidentally Australian dryland farmers developed the medic system and their sustainable farming system without any subsidies at all.
The current food production and distribution system actually works remarkably well for those of us in the UK with enough money to buy almost whatever we choose to eat(wisely or not). It is unsustainable because we outbid others in the world who need food, and this makes us lazy vis a vis local production. Whilst we remain immeasurably richer (or more credit worthy) we will use our purchasing power to ensure land all over the world – and its water resources – is producing our food, plus our biofuels, our sugar, tobacco, wine and other inessentials. And we will continue to depend on oil based fertilisers because our money will draw the resources to us- I don’t know how we shift to sustainable alternatives on a large scale. Many of us try it voluntarily and hope it paves the way to transition to a low carbon, fair society. However there are perverse incentives and wrongly set rules that prevent the change we need – Subsidies on sugar production make bad food too cheap and waste land, rules to enforce high housing densities take us away from garden food production, skewed sustainability funding pushes too many large wood fuelled heating systems, enforced biofuels in our diesel pushes up world food prices. I am not a free marketeer, but just think about the consequences before new rules are developed that take years to change when they are proved wrong.
Folks, whilst your arguments are interesting, and doubtless some of the stuff here would make a difference, are any of you doing anything yourselves to grow?
I have two small children, and nearly a third of an acre on which our house stands, and we are growing our own produce, keeping our own bees (mostly for pollination) and intend, when the children are a little larger, to keep chickens or quail. This year we have eaten our own veg ONLY from May to September, and my daughter, at 2, is an enthusiastic gardener. My mother’s family kept chickens and geese, had an orchard and a large vegetable plot; my other grandmother grew about 50% of her own produce, and certainly always supplied her own table in the winter.
I firmly believe that if we all did what we could in terms of growing for our own families, we could cut our imports massively and – more importantly – set the example to other countries, both 1st and 3rd world, that they could also be largely self-sustaining. The tragedy of Africa is that it could sustain itself so easily and yet many of its people starve, because they are not allowed – through war, corruption and disease – to help themselves do so.
It is the previous generation – the baby boomers largely – who have strayed away from these sorts of sustainable practices, and we ought to look back and learn about what we used to do.
Incidentally, none of my forebears were farmers, and nor are we. Both I and my husband work full time, but we still manage to find time to do this because it is important to us. I only wish I knew more people who did, because I would feel more confidence in our future.