Catweazle wrote:I see so much potentially arable land unused in the UK, but it would need intensive labour to make it productive. We don't have the labour in the right places to do it. Add the uncertainties of the climate ( 20+ degrees today, frost predicted on Monday ) and we could be in trouble.
The "potentially" arable land is unused for arable because it is only "potentially" available. It is "unused" because it is low grade land which doesn't produce arable crops in good quantities and the farmer/owner would make a loss if they cultivated it. It is used as grazing land because it produces grass in good quantities as it has always done, ever since the start of farming in the British Isles.
Now whether that grazing land is in agriculture or horseyculture depends on how close it is to an urban area with lots of little, and not so little, girls who enjoy riding and grooming horses. We graziers find it difficult in West Berkshire to get grazing land because the land owners can make two or three times the income by letting the land to horse owners who are not constrained by economics. I do not let my land for horses because I am not constrained by farming economics, I have another income, and I bought the land nearly forty years ago to produce food on in just the current circumstances.
It might be "potentially" horticultural land with very high inputs initially to get it up to grade and then require high labour inputs to keep it there. But then it still wouldn't make any profits because we are accustomed to low food prices and we can, at the moment, import food from areas with higher sunlight/heat levels and lower labour costs.
If we accepted the lower welfare standards for our food that many other countries that we import food from work to we could have more of our meat grown locally. But we impose high welfare standards on our own farmers and then largely buy cheaper low welfare standard food from abroad.
What we need is a majority of the population to say to government that they are concerned by food security and food quality and that they want the government to ensure that we produce most, probably 95%, of our food here. Some things like citrus fruit, coffee and tea and spices we do not have the climate for, at the moment, but we would want to have the facility to replace them with something that could be grown here if TS properly HTF.
But that would imply higher food costs to support higher labour costs and input costs. We have the land to do it if we ate a lot less meat: there have been at least three studies that I know of which show that we can do that.
The first is from 1975 and although our population has increased greatly since them the other two are more recent and still show that we can do it. One of those is the
Zero Carbon Britain Reports which I have referenced many times before. And the other is one prepared for the government's Committee on Climate Change although I can't find any reference to it on line. I saw a presentation on it at a Climate Conference in London a year or so ago.
