"There is little money, and they are desperate" - much of British farming isn't viable, you don't change this with regulation or protectionism

And yes, I have a beef with the intensive end of my industry, with its beak-clipping, tail-docking, permanent ‘in-housing’, zero-grazing, nitrogen-spewing, Frankenstein cattle-making, prophylactic antibiotic-dosing ways. Raising of livestock in this fashion is not farming, because it abjures any sense of husbandry. It is senseless, inhumane Fordian food-production of ‘units’. Also, the produce from such factory systems, be it milk, meat or eggs, is tasteless, in every sense. I do, however, have sympathy for the managers — not farmers — of these agri-factories. There is little money, and they are desperate.

Reading John Lewis-Stempel's moving piece about farming, I was struck by the last sentence of this little tirade. Lewis-Stempel started his article with a description of shooting a dying sheep and how this started him thinking that we need to change how we farm if livestock farming is to survive. I don't have to share Lewis-Stempel's view of intensive farming to get that, for a lot of UK farmers, it's not a business in any meaningful sense of that word - especially sheep farming.

I remember on a walk near Dent in what is now Cumbria us following the path through a small farmyard where we met a man shearing sheep. Like you do we stopped for a chat and discovered he was doing his own shearing because the cost of employing a professional shearing team meant he'd lose money on every fleece. Even doing the job himself wasn't a guarantee of a return.

This was a man who probably works harder than near everyone you know, hard physical labour in an unforgiving environment to get us products - wool, lamb chops - that we all take for granted (and probably when we look at the cost of that Pure English Wool jumper, is a cause for a little whistle at the price). The average sheep farmer earns about £6,000 a year - way below the minimum wage - from the actual business of rearing, shearing and slaughtering sheep. The whole industry in the UK is only sustained because of working tax credits and government farm support. And since the last round of CAP reforms most of that farm support goes to the landowner - most sheep farmers are tenants.

I wrote a little piece called 'Life on the Farm' inspired by seeing the hill farmers I used to represent as a councillor, mostly old men, none of them rich and all into their seventies working the sorts of hours most of us would consider exploitation - all for a pittance:

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We like to blame a bunch of faceless things for this problem - the government, the supermarkets, international trade, the EU, banks - but the painful truth is that the real problem is us whistling as we see the price. As with so much else we look at the ticket on the shelf or the tag on the hanger and make no connection to the costs involved in getting that product into our hands. So the result - mostly beneficial but sometimes problematic - is intensification, industrialisation and a farming industry that bears no resemblance to the ruddy-faced, bucolic image presented by Countryfile or the collection of celebrity farmers sustained well enough by their media income that the loss making hill farm doesn't matter.

The question of farming and farm standards has, as these things do, arisen in the context of us leaving the EU (with its preference for subsidising landowners over supporting farmers) and entering into a new world of international trade agreements with strange places like the USA. And the chosen battleground of those who didn't want to leave the EU is factory farming - an interesting choice of battle given how much of that industrial livestock production goes on in the EU:

Denmark is a mere 16.5 thousand square miles and produces between 25 to 28 million pigs each year from about 5000 pig farms. For the most part they are kept in what the EU euphemistically calls ‘zero hectare’ farms. Denmark is not alone in this; in France, despite having the largest landmass in the EU, the proportion of pig meat produced by zero hectare farms increased from 31% in 2004 to 64% in 2016, while the proportion of chicken meat rose from 11% to 28% between 2004 and 2016.

According to Eurostat, the number of zero hectare farms in the EU grew by 31%, from 164 000 to 214 000 between 2013 and 2016. At a zero hectare farm, animals are kept indoors and are fed with harvested fodder, or a concentrated diet of grain, soy, and other supplements because according to the EU; ‘farms raising granivores (pigs and poultry) do not necessarily need agricultural land’

Yet we are told by trendy London restaurant PRs, by those media-friendly hobby farmers, and of course by the protectionist National Farmers Union, that free trade with the USA in agriculture would mean indulging a host of really bad practices that undermine the standards of UK production. Forgive me if I call bullshit on this one (unless that is the hobby farmers and restaurant PRs want to abolish UK factory farming). Britain produces about 70% of the chicken it eats (nearly 900 million birds since you ask) - I watch the wagons roll into my village every day, their plastic crates rammed with those birds, ready for slaughtering in our little factory:

UK Chicken farms still abide by EU farming regulations. 90% of UK chickens will be raised at the UK’s minimum standard of 19 birds per square meter, the UK Red Tractor Standard. However ‘extensive indoor (barn-reared)’, the lower of the three higher welfare production standards, is only slightly better at 15 birds per square metre. That is three rows of five birds in every square metre. This maybe fine when they are chicks but when fully grown they would be still be unable to turn around. There is no maximum number of birds in a ‘barn raised’ shed and there is no requirement for the birds to spend any time outside the shed. But as they can be slaughtered after eight weeks, this overcrowding may not be for very long.

So when people decry US standards on the back of a single documentary and a petition, they ignore the reality of the 'high' UK standards since that would mean confronting those painful truths about our farming set out by Lewis-Stempel in his article. And we aren't going to do this, however much folk like Lewis-Stempel wax lyrical about "Medievalist ethical carnivorism". Partly such views represent the growing conservative bucolia, a postmodernist rejection of city life - more for its whizziness than from disposing of its economic power, but mostly it's a convenient tool for the protectionist to secure support for limits, bans, tariffs and restrictions.

As Lewis-Stempel concluded, "(t)here is little money, and they are desperate." But is this a justification for imposing an idealist and elitist view of farming ("Medievalist ethical carnivorism") on consumers? An approach that, while making little difference to those of us with the means to afford expensive meat, condemns many to a largely meat-free life - not from choice but by the economic cost of protectionism. So far the government has resisted the imposition of essentially arbitrary limitations to choice but the widespread support for protectionism ("we care for animals", "the climate", "environmental protection", "British farmers") still threatens to impose less choice and more cost on the majority of consumers.

If Lewis-Stempel wants to produce wool and lamb in accordance with a somewhat rose-tinted view of how medieval peasants produced these things then that's fine (is that the sound of ironic peasant laughter I hear echoing down the years at the idea that they ate less meat from choice rather than poverty). Make the case, create a market - if you find enough people who'll pay for your myth-made lamb steaks then great. But don't seek to impose these changes on the rest of us, don't seek to regulate cheap food out of existences and stop indulging the NFU and its protectionist mission to enrich its members at the cost of British consumers.

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Trade in food is not a special case, we can and will have free trade - beef and liberty.

 The great schisms in conseravtive party thinking have always been, in one way or another, about the cause of free trade. The repeal of the corn laws, for the first time placing feeding people ahead of the financial interests of landowners, pretty near destroyed the party and it was rescued only by replacing the nationalism of protectionism with the jingoism of Empire plus a commitment to put the interests of working people first and foremost.

The party repeated this clash over Imperial Preference again settling for, pretty much, the case of trade over the interests of traders. And for a long while (you'd not believe it to listen to many Brexiteers) the Conservative Party supported our involvement in the evolving European Union because it extended free trade and free exchange to a wider market. It only became a problem when this emerging union began to be more controlling, more protectionist and more interventionist.

Gently and quietly the Conservative Party is tiptoeing away from free trade. For all the fine pro-trade words of Liz Truss, there's a growing body of opinion that believes the way to deliver of the promise to people in those "Red Wall" seats is to embrace as rehashed version of Empire Preference where protectionism applies to all but those privileged by trade deals and where certain sectors, 'strategic' industries, are wholly protected in a vain endeavour to save jobs in struggling firms.

The first salvos in this new war were fired during the consideration of an Agriculture Bill where Labour and some backwoodsman Conservatives sought to amend the bill so "no food could be imported to the UK that is produced to lower standards than food made in Britain". It all sounds good doesn't it, but, as Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger points out, this "...would criminalise a lot of current imports from Europe and Africa, and impose an impossible expectation on our trading partners".

The problem is that Kruger, one of the brightest of the 2019 intake of Conservative MPs, then does some protectionist triangulation on the basis that we can't have "beef and liberty":

In free market theory the interests of producers are subordinate to those of consumers. In agriculture things are not so simple. The objective of food policy should not be ever-cheaper food: we already have the third-cheapest food in the world, after the US and Singapore...

Let's start with the core of this argument - the objective shouldn't be "ever-cheaper food". Can someone explain to me why not? Kruger invokes a sort of bucolic mysticism in explaining this - "...the almost spiritual identification of the nation with the land, its look and feel...", as if stopping us buying cheap Argentinian beef is the only way to maintain this visceral link to the land.

Kruger's argument seems to be that, since we can all afford to pay more for food, there's no sense in making people better off by using trade to secure cheaper food (so we can spend the money we'd otherwise have spent on pricey beef on trips to country pubs or hiring canal boats on the Kennet and Avon). In the end the core of the argument here isn't about the consumer but about a tiny part of Britain's economy - beef farmers.

The next imperative is to stop our farmers being too badly undercut by inferior cheap imports.

The operative word here isn't "inferior" but "cheap". I'm sure that the Brazilian, Argentinian or Texan beef farmer is just as inordinately proud of his product as the Wiltshire farmers Danny Kruger represents. And it's for us, the consumer, to make the judgement about whether the beef the gauchos and cowboys in the New World produce is inferior to the beef farmed on those lush fields outside Devizes.

If British beef is so good then it should not need protection. I spent a few seconds making sure I got the right brand of tinned tomatoes the other day because, although they're 50% more expensive, they're much better quality. The argument that, by making nasty foreign beef more expensive through tariffs and regulations, we make it a level playing field is, quite simply, to stick two fingers up at consumers. As Kruger paraphrases Labour agriculture spokesman, Daniel Zeichman:

"...lovely sustainably-farmed British food for the rich, and cheap foreign muck for the masses."

The masses - ordinary families - are expected to pay more for their food so as to indulge grand folk wanting sustainably-farmed, grass-fed, high-welfare, lovingly-carved, well-hung, stroked, mollycoddled and much-loved beef from cheery farmers in new Range Rovers.

The imperative of cheaper imports is that our beef farmers have either to produce their beef more cheaply or else use the magic of marketing to tell the public that that Dorset, grass-fed beef really is worth paying more for. Instead, through the offices of a union, these farmers choose to lobby politicians so as to fix the market, to, in effect, impose a tax on consumers to the benefit of relatively wealthy beef farmers in Wiltshire.

Kruger says "Tories have to choose between beef and liberty". I say this is not so, we can and should have both. We fought this battle nearly 200 years ago, we fought is again 100 years ago, we need to fight it again and, on behalf of the ordinary family, come out strongly and proudly in favour of free trade. We can and will have beef AND liberty.

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Great technology but lousy business - the urban farming revolution that isn't

There's an article in the New Yorker about 'vertical farming' - this is the use of redundant urban spaces to create farms:

No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the address of Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson, a steel-supply company. It was like a lumberyard for steel, which it bought in bulk from distant mills and distributed in smaller amounts, mostly to customers within a hundred-mile radius of Newark. It sold off its assets in 2008 and later shut down. In 2015, a new indoor-agriculture company called AeroFarms leased the property. It had the rusting corrugated-steel exterior torn down and a new building erected on the old frame. Then it filled nearly seventy thousand square feet of floor space with what is called a vertical farm. The building’s ceiling allowed for grow tables to be stacked twelve layers tall, to a height of thirty-six feet, in rows eighty feet long. The vertical farm grows kale, bok choi, watercress, arugula, red-leaf lettuce, mizuna, and other baby salad greens.

Pretty interesting stuff especially when you look at the technology involved where the production system uses a tiny proportion of the water typically used to grow those baby salad greens. Indeed this sort of technology holds out considerable opportunity for the further intensification of high added value salad vegetable production - anyone driving through the Fens will see the polytunnels and greenhouses that might form the basis for this technology, especially in a world where water is more expensive, to really make a difference.

The problem is that urban spaces really aren't the best places - even with multistorey production - to do such a business. Here's a clue:

The AeroFarms clamshell package (clear plastic, No. 1 recyclable) appears to be the same size as its competition’s but it holds slightly less—4.5 ounces instead of five. It is priced at the highest end, at $3.99. The company plans to have its greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local area. Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days.

So we've a product that is significantly more expensive that the more traditionally produced product. Even were a tighter ship to be run it is unlikely that AeroFarms will be able to compete with the mass production in California leaving it with a niche market of people who want to buy 'local' production.

This vertical farming requires the acquisition of expensive urban real estate and a significant capital investment just to grow stuff for a niche part of a niche market for salad vegetables. The idea that this sort of production will somehow release current agricultural land for rewilding is pretty much nonsense. The plant in New Jersey featured in the article will have cost some $39 million (including nearly $9 million in government grants) to create a little more than an acre of vertical farmland - right now agricultural land in New Jersey sells for about $10,000 an acre.

The technology here is genuinely exciting but, even in run down urban areas, there is no way that vertical farming on expensive real estate is the solution. And this is before we recognise that businesses like AeroFarms focus on agricultural products with pretty much the highest margins - salad leaves for yuppies - rather than on the sort of production that dominates arable farming in the USA: corn, wheat, potatoes, barley and so forth. Lovely technology but lousy business.

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Abolishing the Corn Laws again - the case against 'food security'

It's not every day that you read an article saying that it was a mistake to repeal the Corn Laws:

The situation created by the British vote to leave the European Union is momentous for UK food. It is on a par with the Repeal of the Corn Laws of 1846 when Britain decided its Empire could feed it, not its own farmers.

The point about the Corn Laws was that they existed for the sole reason of keeping grain prices high so as to sustain marginal British agriculture. With the expected effect of making food prices higher:

The high price caused the cost of food to increase and consequently depressed the domestic market for manufactured goods because people spent the bulk of their earnings on food rather than commodities. The Corn Laws also caused great distress among the working classes in the towns. These people were unable to grow their own food and had to pay the high prices in order to stay alive.

By opening British farmers up to competition, the repeal of the Corn Laws resulted in cheaper grain and, therefore, cheaper bread (and beer). We forget, however, that the main justification for the corn laws wasn't landowner self-interest but the belief (at the end of a long war and a series of poor harvests) that what we'd now call food security was more important than open trade. At the heart of the food security concept is the idea of self-sufficiency.

My concern is that the security of food might get lost in the debacle. The UK must not let that happen. Food stocks are low in a just-in-time economy, an estimated three to five days’ worth. The UK doesn’t feed itself. It has dropped to 61% self-sufficiency, Defra reported last month.

Now leaving aside how the UK being self-sufficient in food is compatible with membership of the EU, let's ask instead what the consequence of self-sufficiency might be - here Professor Lang's article is helpful. The consequence - a policy aim in the professor's world - will be more expensive food:

Part of the challenge now is the UK’s love of cheap food. This was the legacy of the Repeal of the Corn Laws which sought cheap food for workers. Cheapness as efficiency is still central to the neoliberal project today, as Michael Gove stated in the referendum campaign. But in food, cheapness encourages waste and makes us fat. Good diets are too expensive for the poor.

Again, we'll ignore that Professor Lang also tells us in his article that Brexit will make food more expensive, and ask instead whether there is any practical basis for deliberately making food more expensive (for there surely isn't any moral basis). We'll note the negative impact on the economy from people spending more of their income on food - a huge and unnecessary opportunity cost. The main - probably the only - case is a health one:

The researchers found that healthier diet patterns—for example, diets rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, and nuts—cost significantly more than unhealthy diets (for example, those rich in processed foods, meats, and refined grains). On average, a day’s worth of the most healthy diet patterns cost about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy ones.

The problem here is that we have to accept the premise - Diet X is healthier than Diet Y - and to agree that there is a reason for government to intervene in food pricing (for example by making grain more expensive). And to understand just how much more expensive. Plus of course, we have to agree with the researchers that the price differential is so substantial remembering that these are extreme measures - the 'most unhealthy' diet set against the 'most healthy' diet.

So instead we get food policy planning that uses the idea of 'food security', on the assumption that there is a genuine threat to the supply of food meaning that, in the worst case, we get food riots. Indeed, Professor Lang thinks these are on the way because of Brexit:

But given that the WTO rules are “the lowest common denominator” and the Codex Alimentarius is determined in meetings that are “dominated by big business and lobbies [making] the EU look like the most democratic organisation in the world”, this is far from ideal. The result would be food riots, says professor Lang.

The agricultural sector is very keen (especially the bit that actually owns the land) to get this idea of food security high up on the agenda when food is discussed. It is the biggest justification for the continuance of agricultural subsidy post-Brexit and for the sorts of high-tariff models loved by the EU, USA and Japan. We should be resisting such a model (subsidy plus tariffs) since - as we can see from the corn laws experience - the result is more expensive food acting as a drag on the economy to the benefit of a tiny proportion of the UK's population. Smaller even than you think:

Each year we’re seeing a further concentration of benefits in the hands of fewer,
larger landowners, who seem to use their subsidy cheques to buy up more land and more subsidy ­entitlements,” Jack Thurston, the co-founder of farmsubsidy.org, told the Scotsman. “Most people think farm subsidies are there to help the small guy but we’re seeing it’s quite the reverse. The bigger you are, the better your land, the more public aid you get,” he said.

So we've a system of support (as, unintentionally, Professor Lang shows) not far removed from those 19th century corn laws. We know also that the main impact of subsidy comes in raising land values meaning that those agricultural subsidies and supports are doing little or nothing to maintain food security but represent a straight transfer of money from the taxpayer to the owners of agricultural land.

We should explore whether there is a model that works rather than promising to stay in the warm bath of subsidy after we've left the EU. Perhaps starting by asking how New Zealanders can grow onions that sell in a Kentish farm shop for the same price as locally grown onions. And why those Kiwis can produce lamb, ship it to the UK, sell it for less than British producers and make a profit:

New Zealand is the largest dairy and sheep meat exporter in the world, and a major global supplier of beef, wool, kiwifruit, apples and seafood. New Zealand-grown produce feeds over 40 million people, with 7,500 animal products and 3,800 dairy products going to 100 countries every month.

All of this without any subsidy:

New Zealand agriculture is profitable without subsidies, and that means more people staying in the business. Alone among developed countries of the world, New Zealand has virtually the same percentage of its population employed in agriculture today as it did 30 years ago, and the same number of people living in rural areas as it did in 1920. Although the transition to an unsubsidized farm economy wasn’t easy, memories of the adjustment period are fading fast and today there are few critics to be found of the country’s bold move.

So ask yourself a question. Do you want the sort of protectionist, subsidy-hungry food security that sucks up over £10 billion each and every year. Or an agricultural sector that contributes to a growing and successful economy? For me food security isn't about self-sufficiency but is about diversity and choice - we're more at risk if we've only one supplier of grain than if we've 50 suppliers. Yet the advocates of policy based on food security still argue that protectionism, trade barriers and expensive food (plus rich landowners) is the way to provide that security. The argument we thought we'd won back in 1846 when those Corn Laws were scrapped is still here today and we have to make the case for open trade in food all over again.

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Care about the planet? Well stop saying local is better then.

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One of the most common myths of the modern trendy progressive world is that which say 'local' is always better - for the economy, for the planet and for society. If only we 'transitioned' our places into being locally-focused, resilient communities filled with independent shops, urban gardens and local food networks say the advocates - with comments like this ever so common:

The same goes for agriculture, textiles, and many other sectors where returning to local, human-scaled enterprise will lead to less worker exploitation and environmental damage while producing better, healthier products. Nonindustrial practices may be more labor-intensive, but they’re also better for us all. For those of us used to white-collar jobs, the idea of growing vegetables or making clothes may seem like a big step backward toward more menial labor. But consider for a moment the sorts of activities the wealthiest Americans or most satisfied retirees engage in enthusiastically: brewing craft beers, knitting, and gardening. If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts.

This quote is from a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and was quoted - as an example of progressive ignorance - by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. What bothers me most isn't the stuff about the local multiplier that are used to justify resilience - we know that's pretty much nonsense - or even the truth that this sort of local protectionism only makes us poorer. No, what bothers me is that the idiot progressives promoting transition towns and putting up these 'back to the land' arguments are completely wrong about its environmental impact.

It simply isn't true that this return to pre-industrial production has less environmental impact than modern intensive agriculture or mass-production of the clothes and tools we need. We know that extensive agriculture uses more inputs than intensive agriculture, which is a pretty wasteful start, but we also know that this sort of farming is more polluting and has a bigger impact on wildlife and the local environment. Yet the 'Greens' and their progressive fellow travellers persist with their myth-making and in denying that the same benefits come from agricultural intensification as come from any other improvement in our efficiency in using resources - it makes us richer, it puts less strain on the planet and it allows time for those pleasant pastimes like home brew beer and allotment gardening.

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Free range chicken isn't healthier or more sustainable. It's just tastes better and costs more.

I'm prepared to accept that free range chickens taste better. I also know that the way those chickens are bred means they cost a whole lot more than the chickens produced in batteries or other intensive farming methods. But this argument is wrong:

Despite the fact that sustainable poultry production systems deliver huge benefits to the environment and public health, the producers using these methods have no option but to compete on an unlevel playing field. Worse, we are paying for the damage caused by industrial food production in hidden ways, through taxes, in the form of misdirected subsidies from the common agricultural policy, through water pollution clean-up costs and through national health service treatment costs.

Firstly there's no evidence that intensive farming is more damaging to the environment than traditional or organic methods. In fact the reverse is true - traditional and organic methods are less environmentally-friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

So far from there being an environmental benefit from moving away from agricultural intensification, the reverse is true - if we want a less polluting agriculture then intensification is the right choice. This is quite simply because that supposedly "sustainable" system is less efficient. We get expensive food and a more damaged environment.

The public health issues are equally misplaced. There is no evidence at all that organic methods are healthier than methods using modern pest control or fertilisers. - it's just that all those healthy looking chickens scuttling about in feels give us the impression that eating them will be healthier.

So when the Sustainable Food Trust tell you their methods are healthier and have less environmental impact they aren't telling you the whole truth. And, when they call for the system to be skewed to support their methods, what they are doing is making you pay more for food with the only benefit going to the organic farmers' bank balances.

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Cows aren't destroying the planet. Ignorant folk like George Monbiot are.

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George Monbiot is having a go at cows. Well, not just cows but sheep, pigs, chickens and goats as well. And probably alpaca, yaks and dromedaries too.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price.

As usual with Monbiot, the article is replete with links to assorted stuff mostly from the more scaremongering end of the climate change community. And the premise seems superficially appealing - it does require a whole load of grass to fatten a cow and, if we're growing grass we can't be growing grain crops suitable for humans to eat. The problem with this argument is that the facts about agriculture's land use don't fit Monbiot's scare story:

Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner (2013) argue that ‘peak farm’ is already a reality, saying ‘while the ratio of arable land per unit of crop production shows improved efficiency of land use, the number of hectares of cropland has scarcely changed since 1990. Absent the 3.4 percent of arable land devoted to energy crops (Trostle 2008), absolute declines would have begun during the last decade.’

In simpler terms, improved agricultural efficiency is allowing us to feed the world's population while using less land. The main reason for this, of course, is that there is a lot less inefficient subsistence farming (the sort of farming that organisations like Oxfam spend a lot of time trying to preserve) and a lot more commercial and industrial agriculture. Moreover, in terms of resource use, this sort of intensive farming is far more environmentally friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Farming - not everywhere but in too many places - is treated as if it were some sort of cultural activity rather than the means by which we feed the world's population. Monbiot talks about waste management issues associated with farming but doesn't recognise that these exist because, unlike other industries, farming has not had to capture the cost of this waste. It is not an inevitable consequence of of the business. Moreover, as those chaps at UC Davis showed, less intensive production is more polluting.

Finally can we put this greenhouse gas malarkey to bed. The cow's only source of carbon is the grass she chews. And the grass only has one source of carbon - the atmosphere. A good chunk of that carbon ends up in those fine marbled steaks we eat. So saying that a lot of the 'greenhouse gas' emissions come from cows farting might be true, but only if we believe that somehow those cows are magically creating more carbon than they consume.

As usual Monbiot is telling half-truths and peddling misinformation.

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Friday Fungus: Terroir - or how fungi make your wine taste different

The idea of 'terroir' is well-known to wine buffs and is most commonly described as:

In a larger context, wine tasters try to define terroir as the specificity of place, which has come to include not only the soil in a region, but also the climate, the weather, the aspect of the vineyards and anything else that can possibly differentiate one piece of land from another.

The same grape grown in a different place will produce similar but distinct wine. And the wine buffs will talk about soil, climate, aspect and even the phases of the moon in trying to explain what this all means. Funnily enough they never mention mushrooms let alone fungi. Well they should:

Professor White offers a scientific, if unromantic explanation of terroir: wine character can be determined by the rate of water and nutrient uptake by the vine, and different types of soils will affect this rate — with microorganisms playing an important role in this process.

He describes how the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil form a symbiotic relationship with the vine’s roots. “The mycelium of the fungus grows within the root itself,” he says. “And some of the hyphae grow out into the surrounding soil, extending the root surface available and enhancing the uptake of water and nutrients such as phosphorus.”

The degree to which these fungi are around plus the different varieties will affect the rate of water and nutrient intake - ergo changing the flavour of the wine. And there's more because those other (and rather important to making alcohol) fungi, yeasts will vary from location to location:

“The wild yeasts that come in to the winery from the vineyard with the grapes can influence a wine’s character, particularly at the start of a spontaneous ferment,” says Paul Chambers, research manager in biosciences at the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. “And there’s mounting evidence that the complexity of microflora of each vineyard varies from region to region.”

Terroir is a romantic notion filled with the idea of a place's history, its uniqueness - the concept is part of wine's mystique. Yet the reality is that microbial variations and the different fungi knocking around the patch are the reasons for that difference rather than just soil, climate or aspect (and let's be clear that the phases of the moon stuff is nonsense).

Another way in which fungi make our lives (and the wine) wonderful!

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The Adam Smith Institute's 'Green Belt' proposals are both wrong and silly

Not Green Belt but very protected

There's quite a gulf between the two extremes in the debate about housing supply - from those who say it's all down to planning through to those who tell us that the deliberate constraint of land supply has nothing to do with that lack of housing supply.

However, it is important when we engage in this debate that we understand the policies we criticise (or support). And it is on this point that the Adam Smith Institute consistently fails:

The first step is to classify Green Belt land into its three types. There is verdant land, with fields, meadows and woods – what most people think of when they think about Green Belts. There is ‘brown,’ or damaged land, including abandoned mines and quarries and former industrial buildings. Thirdly there is agricultural land, much of it given to intensive cultivation on vast fields using fertilizers and pesticides. It falls well short of being environmentally friendly.

Once the land is classified into its three types, the verdant land should be left untouched. All of the ‘brown’ land should be made available for building. In addition a one-mile deep strip of agricultural land at the inner edge of the Green Belt should be made available for house-building. In compensation, at least a mile of agricultural land beyond the outer edge of the Green Belt should be added to it as verdant Green Belt.

If you are to reform a policy it helps to understand the reasons for that policy existing - the ASI, in the example above, completely misunderstands the reason for us having a 'Green Belt'. And the way in which development on that land is constrained.

The Green Belt, according to policy, serves five purposes:

1. to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
2. to prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;
3. to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
4. to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
5. to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.

Only one of these purposes relates to aesthetics (and the protection of settings for historic towns is very narrowly drawn). The remainder of the purposes are there for the practical and essentially conservative reason of preserving the identity of places by preventing sprawl and encouraging the recycling of redundant land within those places. There's a point at which the tightness of a 'Green Belt' results in over-dense development that really isn't sustainable or in the best interests of the economy.

The ASI wants to identify what it calls 'verdant' land in the 'Green Belt' so it can be protected. Again the ASI fails to appreciate that there are a bundle of other planning mechanisms intended to do just that. These tools range from Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and Special Landscape Areas (SLAs) through Habitat Regulation Assessments (HRAs) and Local Nature Partnerships to World Heritage Sites, Conservation Areas and Local Landscape Policy Areas (plus many others - too many to list). The existence or otherwise of a Green Belt is not relevant to any of these policies - they protect on the basis of scientific, ecological, archaeological or aesthetic reasons for resisting inappropriate development.

Furthermore, in broad terms, previously used land in the Green Belt (what the ASI chooses to call 'brown' or 'damaged' land) is developable. The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) says it's fine for:

...the partial or complete redevelopment of previously developed sites (brownfield land), whether redundant or in continuing use (excluding temporary buildings), which would not have a greater impact on the openness of the Green Belt and the purpose of including land within it than the existing development.

This isn't always popular (as we discovered during the Rochester and Strood by-election) but it demonstrates how thoughtful and sensitive development can take place within a Green Belt. Indeed, the relaxation of policy in the NPPF has already begun to deliver:

Glenigan was approached to investigate the number of new homes being approved on greenbelt sites and found that in 2013/14, 5,607 homes were granted permission. In the following year, this had reached 11,977, which also represented a five-fold increase since 2009/10.

These developments are almost all small scale - the conversion of redundant farm buildings, infill within small hamlets and the building of individual buildings on previously developed sites. The numbers aren't sufficient to change the economics of housing supply but it is significant that a minor change in attitude to development rights in 'Green Belt' has had such a profound affect without any alteration to the purpose of that 'Green Belt' as defined in policy guidance.

There is a very strong case for a full review of London's 'Green Belt' but this isn't the same as saying that there shouldn't be a 'Green Belt' or that we should (or even in terms of practical geography, could) simply take "a one-mile deep strip of agricultural land at the inner edge of the Green Belt" for house-building. In policy terms this fails on several counts - it ignores other protections (e.g. habitat regulations, flood risk), it takes no account of current or planned infrastructure, and it makes no attempt to match the location of housing supply to objectively assessed housing need. Such a blunt approach to 'Green Belt' review is worse than previous ASI comments that simply called for 'Green Belts' (or indeed the whole planning system) to be scrapped.

Finally, the ASI's attack on "agricultural land, much of it given to intensive cultivation on vast fields using fertilizers and pesticides" doesn't sit at all well with that organisation's supposed support for markets - intensification is about the more efficient use of land and reduces production costs allowing for a sustainable sector (that might allow us to stop subsidising it quite so much). More to the point, the ASI's ugly agricultural landscape absolutely fits the core outcome of 'Green Belt' policies - openness.

I fully understand - and have a great deal of sympathy for - criticism of planning. But if we are to set out a reform approach, it has to be grounded in real geography, based on the purpose of the policy in question and must avoid the ASI's biggest error, an essentially arbitrary land allocation. If the ASI took the trouble to read and understand a little of England's planning policy, it might be able to create a better approach to 'Green Belt' reform. Until that time it's just wrong and looks silly.

....

Life on the farm...

Catstones Moor from Tan House, Wilsden on a cold April day

From where I lie
The sheep can safely graze
The farm breasts through the haze
And all is still
From where I lie
A magpie skirts the vale
Reminder now of this o'er-deepening dale
And all is still

The old tractor splutters and coughs into the little farmyard, its days work done. Another day in its thirty years of lifting, shifting, towing and spreading on the sparse fields of a Yorkshire hill farm. The engine is stilled and the driver - the tenant of that hill farm - clambers down from the tractor's cab.

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We idealise farming - on the telly the life's not that of an old man with Parkinson's struggling to keep enough together so as to just about make a living. Instead we see a big strong man striding across the fields talking purposefully about the jobs and tasks around the farm. Or else some presenter's plaything of a hill farm - filled with a restored farmhouse, lambs, chickens and beautiful moorland views. A million miles away from our old tenant farmer, from the reality of hill farming.

Sat in his tatty armchair sipping a mug of tea our farmer might let his mind wander to the neighbour - the farmer dragged through the courts, broken and bankrupted because he shot a dog that worried his sheep, a dog that threatened his meagre livelihood. The village a short while away is filled with suburban dog-owners who see the fields as some sort of playground where the dogs can run.

Or the farmer might think of tomorrow's tasks - the wall to fix where someone decided to liberate some stone for a little garden feature of a wall, there's maybe muck to spread, later there'll be hay to cut and gather. And there's always paperwork. Endless paperwork - from DEFRA, from the Council, from the benefits people. Plus the bank - he smiles as he remembers the local farmer who drove his muck-spreader into Keighley and treated the front of Barclay's Bank with some choice muck - and the suppliers he hopes to put off paying for a few weeks.

Farming in England's uplands is dying - quite literally. Our farmer is all too typical - it's not a business he's running, he's only kept from starving by subsidy and the benefits system. And there is no succession, no new farmers. Why should there be when no-one can make a living from running an upland farm - even with the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet we expect that farmer to provide a service to us all - keeping footpaths open, mending fences, treating and keeping the land and raising livestock. All so we can get all misty-eyed as we talk about the unique moorland environment and campaign for special designations so that place can be protected from heaven knows what.

If we want to conserve those uplands - so we can walk, cycle, ride horses across it or maybe just drive through it to a pub with a view - then we need to ask how we are going to pay for it. Because those farmers - old, tired, ill and poor - simply aren't going to be there to do all the heavy lifting of loving and caring for the place. So next time you see two old men and a lad fixing a stone wall don't just admire the skill or even appreciate the effort. Instead ask how your free enjoyment of the countryside - enshrined in law - is being paid for. Then before you get back into your new-ish motor to drive back to town, blush a little in guilt at how a poor man's money is being spent on providing you with a playground.

....

Urban agriculture - the latest green indulgence

Jane Jacobs argued in The Economy of Cities that agriculture was a consequence of urbanism not, as is commonly held, the reverse. Jacobs' argument was that settled communities developed in places where there was plenty of food and people in those cities began cultivating gardens and experimenting with growing rather than gathering food.

The problem is that, so far as archaeological investigation allows, this is not the case:

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her ‘cities first’ model, we review current archaeological knowledge from the Near East, China and Mesoamerica to document the temporal precedence of agriculture before urbanism in each of these regions. Contrary to the opinions of Jacobs and Taylor, archaeological data are in fact sufficiently robust to reconstruct patterns of diet, settlement and social organization in the past, and to assign dates to the relevant sites. 

This isn't to say that urban living isn't an important driver of invention and innovation but rather to observe that, however appealing, the idea that the countryside is sclerotic and trapped in an unchanging stasis wholly misrepresents agriculture and agricultural innovation. This doesn't stop urban designers, wrapped in green ideas, wanting to recreate that mythical urban agriculture. In one respect this represents the dream of having and eating the urban cake - we want the things that a large city offers in terms of variety, culture and opportunity as well as the bucolic charms of the countryside.

A team led by Perkins+Will and the LA River Corp just released the results of its Urban Agriculture Study for the area, which borders the LA River and gritty neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Cypress Park, Lincoln Heights, and Glassell Park. Funded by State Proposition 84, the study zeroes in on agriculture projects that can both attract green developers and serve local needs. Pilot projects are set to start this spring, and some related infrastructure has already begun. Other members of the team include community outreach partner GDML, urban agriculture expert Jesse Dubois, and financing consultants PFAL.

The proposals are financed through a bond intended for "safe drinking water, water quality and supply, flood control, waterway and natural resource protection, water pollution and contamination control, state and local park improvements, public access to natural resources, and water conservation efforts", and represent the usual smoke and mirrors associated with multi-agency urban environmentalism. At the heart of the project's rationale is the idea that the current model of agriculture less than environmentally optimal especially given the geographical distance between production and consumption.

However, the carbon footprint of food is overwhelmingly in its production rather than in its distribution - and this is why, in environmental terms, urban agriculture is a bad idea. This LA scheme illustrates the problem with its proposed production model:

Because the neighborhood has few greenfields, and could potentially have ground and air contamination, the plan suggests largely “controlled agriculture,” with internally regulated techniques like hydroponics, aquaponics, and greenhouses.

So rather than grow the food in a more-or-less natural environment, we opt instead for the use of high-cost, high-carbon 'controlled agriculture', for a world of high specification, architect-designed greenhouses rather than dull old fields with crops growing in them.

The proposers of the scheme also recognise that urban agriculture - other than for particular high margin markets - makes little or no economic sense either. They don't quite put it this way but that's what they're saying:

The study also suggests developing alternative financing methods, and in order to begin implementation, the team is now talking to non-profit partners like EnrichLA, which builds gardens in green spaces in local schools; Goodwill, which has a large training center in the area; Homeboy Industries, which runs a training and education program for at-risk youth; and arts group Metabolic Studio. The team is also meeting with local schools, food processing centers (like LA Prep), and government entities such as the Housing Authority of Los Angeles.

Nowhere in this is there any of that old-fashioned financing and this is because those old sort of investors (the ones without big charitable trust funds or taxpayers' cash in their piggy banks) look at urban agriculture and conclude that it simply isn't viable. We're getting a lot of very expensive infrastructure intended to grow food that right now is available cheaply and readily in the local supermarket having been grown in fields elsewhere in the world. More to the point those investors will look at the land being taken for this inefficient and expensive agriculture and ask questions like "wouldn't it be better to build houses with gardens?"

Indeed it's this question of land values - made worse in California by their very limiting planning system - that makes that urban agriculture uneconomic. Here's Pierre Desrochers describing the end of Parisian urban agriculture:

Urban agriculture in Paris and elsewhere quickly faded away at the turn of the twentieth century. The development of new technologies such as the railroad, refrigeration and improved fertilizers made it possible to grow food much more cheaply where nature provided more sunshine, heat, water and better soils. The movers and shakers in more profitable industries that benefitted from an urban location were willing and able to pay more for land while urban agricultural workers moved in ever-increasing numbers into more lucrative manufacturing operations. These realities haven’t changed. Urban farming simply does not create enough return on investment from scarce capital relative to other activities in cities.

Urban agriculture - whether grand schemes such as this one in California or local schemes such as Incredible Edible in Todmorden - is an indulgence rather than some form of environmental salvation let alone a viable economic proposition. And don't get me wrong here, if communities want to invest in these things - to collectivise the vegetable patch so to speak - that's great. Surrounding ourselves with living and growing things helps make the urban environment more pleasing - indeed there's nothing new about urban greenery:

According to accounts, the gardens were built to cheer up Nebuchadnezzar's homesick wife, Amyitis. Amyitis, daughter of the king of the Medes, was married to Nebuchadnezzar to create an alliance between the two nations. The land she came from, though, was green, rugged and mountainous, and she found the flat, sun-baked terrain of Mesopotamia depressing. The king decided to relieve her depression by recreating her homeland through the building of an artificial mountain with rooftop gardens. 

The world is improved by parks, gardens and we get joy from planting and growing but the prosaic industry of growing, producing and distributing the food needed to feed the world's billions isn't about that joy or pleasure but rather about hard economics facts. And one of those hard economic facts is that cities aren't the place for growing our food.

....

Why the world isn't going to run out of food.

Various publications have leapt on some research looking at 'peak-rate years of global resource use' to scare us with a new thing called 'peak food':

Researchers from Yale University, Michigan State University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany claim what makes their study alarming is how many staple foods have peaked in a short space of time, and as global population levels are expected to reach nine billion by 2050.

So reports the Independent - indeed they have a suitably alarmist quotation from one of the researchers. The problem is that what the researchers are measuring for renewable resources like food isn't total resource use but the rate of increase. So the rate in the expansion of agricultural land started to decline around 1950 ('peak land' if you want to use alarmist speak) and, the authors point out, "recently stabilized at the highest recorded levels, about 1.8 x 10⁶ ha (Ramankutty and Foley 1999)."

The result of this is:

Since the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, the world's cereal (grain) production has increased by 136 percent - from 877 million metric tons per year to 2068 million in 2003¹ (Figure 1). Grain yields increased by 129 percent over the same period, from 1.4 to 3.1 metric tons per hectare. Total grain production in the United States (U.S.) also doubled - from 164 million metric tons in 1961 up to 349 million in 2003, accounting for 17 percent of the total global grain production. At the same time, overall U.S. grain crop yields doubled from 2.5 to 5.9 metric tons per hectare, an increase of 136 percent and almost double the global average. Europe experienced similar gains.

So the calories available per capita for the world's population now stand at around 2800 calories per day (and yes, I know that this is pretty unevenly distributed). Given that the NHS recommends an intake of 2500 per day for men and 2000 per day for women all this suggests that there is plenty of scope for us to feed a larger population (about 300 million or so larger).

There's no doubt that we face a challenge to meet the calorie requirements for a growing world population. But this rather questions the typical green left response to this problem (their preference for eugenics aside) - talking about local sustainability, resiliance and self-sufficiency. The authors of this study also report on 'peak energy':

The available data suggest that peak-rate years for several nonrenewable resources, i.e., coal, gas, oil, and phosphorus, have not yet occurred.

This suggests that there is plenty of scope to meet energy needs without taking up valuable agricultural land to do so. About 10% of agricultural land is given over to 'biofuels' and other forms of non-food crop - that land would provide enough food (depending on whose calculation you use) for around 250 million people.

The other consideration is crop yields. The 2013 yield per acre for the USA is 7340 kg/ha which compares to a world average of around 3500 kg/ha (it was 3563.54 kg/ha in 2010). If all yields rose to the level in the USA world food production would more than double. If yields reached the levels of Belgium (9213 kg/ha) then world production would be 2.6 times higher - enough to feed a world population of 23 billion much more than even the most dire predictions of the population doomsters.

Finally there are prices. If we were seeing real pressure on supply we would expect to see food prices rising. Here's the FAO Food Price Index since 1960 - it doesn't suggest that there's much of a problem:

This 'peak food' thing makes for a nice story (and I guess we need to be challenged) but the data really doesn't suggest that the world is running out of food or indeed anywhere close to running out of food. And I know one thing for sure - autarky, self-sufficiency, community resilience, agricultural protectionism and anthropomorphic attitudes to animal welfare will make things worse. The very greeny-greeny left that gets all agitated by things like 'peak food' are the very people who always propose solutions that would merely make matters worse.

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Capitalism will eliminate poverty if we let it (and ignore Oxfam)

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The world's plutocrats are gathering in Davos. And, in its annual tradition Oxfam has issued an update of its report on how us evil capitalist bastards are responsible for all that death and starvation in Africa. If only we would tax ourselves more and give the good folk at Oxfam more aid money then things would be fine. The problem is that Oxfam is utterly committed to promoting policies that sustain poverty - its stated aim is to make subsistence farming "sustainable" thereby keeping those peasant farmers just above the point of starvation through the use of aid money.

This article argues that policies used by middle and high-income countries are unsuitable for poorer, agricultural countries; it recommends instead that these nations promote broader access to land and raise land productivity. The authors explain why instruments used by richer countries, such as those that control prices and cheapen food, fail in poorer countries. They describe the features of smallholder farmers in poorer countries, drawing upon evidence from India, Peru, and Guatemala to demonstrate how subsistence farming can be part of policy responses to the distress of a food crisis in both the short and medium term. They call upon donors to improve their understanding of and support for small-scale, subsistence-oriented farming.

What Oxfam are saying here is that it's different in these poor countries and that the thing that made us western folk rich - capitalism - isn't going to work. Indeed, it is utterly shocking that Oxfam support policies that lead to more expensive food, less efficient agriculture and the maintaining of abject poverty in poor countries. So when you reach into your pocket for some change to put in that Oxfam tin or sponsor some well-meaning niece in her swimming or running, think for a second where that money is going. I'm not talking about administration costs here or even the buying of top end 4x4s for aid workers but the policies - policies that sustain poverty in Africa - that Oxfam supports.

The truth is that, not only is Oxfam wrong, but their support for protectionist policies at Davos actively advances the very agenda of those plutocrats and prevents Africa from challenging the dominance of the west. Instead of wibble about taxation or the liberal use of the word 'neoliberalism' what Oxfam needs to demand is an end to agricultural protection in the developed world, a more open banking system and the wider promotion of property rights, free markets and free trade.

Over the past three decades that neoliberalism - the thing Oxfam wants to blame for the ills of the world - has resulted in a billion people escaping abject poverty. Better still, for many of that billion the escape from poverty has been an escape from the tyranny of dirt-scrabble farming. They've moved to the city from where they can play a small part in creating exciting, free and innovative societies - just as happened in the west. Oxfam and its fellow travellers stand - using our cash - between people and the realisation of this dream.

I wrote this a while back - it is still true:

Sit back, put a smile on you face - punch the air with joy. You and me - capitalists both - have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world - they've done that, they've lifted those people out of poverty.

Tell Oxfam to either get out of the way or get with the neoliberalism that is ending poverty more quickly that at any time in human history.


....

More nonsense about urban farming...

****
Urban farming, some believe, is the solution to all our problems. Rather than shifting food from distant locations to the urban communities where we live, we farm the corners, roundabouts and gardens and cultivate diused land so as to feed ourselves. It's all terribly jolly and green, typified by the Incredible Edible programme in Todmorden. I love it, the randomness, the cheeky nature of swooping on a little patch of urban green and seeding it with herbs is great.

However, when people start taking this stuff seriously they start talking nonsense. Here's a report from some professors at Sheffield University:

THE COUNTRY may only have 100 harvests left because of intensive over farming unless drastic action is taken, according to university scientists

They say the problem has depleted the soil of the nutrients needed to grow crops and suggest converting parts of the UK’s towns and cities into new farmyards.

Scientists from Sheffield University warn that a lack of bio-diversity is causing a dramatic fall in the country ‘s wildlife populations.

A study by Dr Jill Edmondson has also found that soils under Britain’s allotments are significantly healthier than soils that have been intensively farmed.

Now I'm going to take the scientists' information at face value - it really isn't surprising that the soil in allotments, lovingly and intensively managed by the hobby horticulturalist, is better than the soil on the typical commercial farm. But that really doesn't make it either sensible of viable to replace the production from farmland with production from gardens or allotments. More significantly, yields from commercial farming as vastly higher than yields from hobby farming. Despite stagnant yields in some crops, there's not much evidence to suggest that the dire predictions from the Sheffield University team will come to pass.

However there's another important point to be made here which is about land use and land values. We know that urban and rural land values are massively different. According to Savills the average value for farmland in Great Britain is £9,750 per acre whereas residential development land can be values at £900,000 per acre of higher. Quite obviously there is no way in which the value of the land for other uses (housing, parkland, highway, commercial or industrial) can be substituted for agricultural use and for the farmer to be able to recover his outlay from the profits generated by growing stuff.

As one comment on urban agriculture put it:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

The right response is to work on either protecting biodiversity and soil quality in intensive agriculture or at opening up more land (not just in the UK, America and Europe but in Africa and Asia) to productive agricultural uses. Suggesting that Sheffield's twee Love Square - or any similar sort of project - is any kind of solution to food supply challenges is arrant nonsense. But it's so much more fun to play at farmer in our spare time and to prattle on about urban food production.

Hardly a day passes without some further argument support intensification and densification within urban communities. It's as if that science fiction image of cities captured in biodomes, self-sufficient and shiny but surrounded by wilderness, has become the real ambition of the green movement. What they miss is that the image was always a convenient plot structure rather than a painting of a real future, a way for the writer to explore the logical conclusions - good and bad - of urban living.

The sad part of this green myth-making is the seriousness with which some folk treat it - they seem unconnected to economic reality as they pretend their sweet world of sustainable towns peopled by walking, cycling allotment owners is anything but a greenwashed version of subsistance agriculture - the very form of poverty that we escaped from by moving to cities and creating the modern capitalist society.

....

Jay Rayner, millionaire food snob, tells poor families their food is too cheap...

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It has become something of a trend - millionaire cultural lefties popping up to tell poor folk that they are paying too much for stuff. The other day it was Vivienne Westwood railing about capitalism while charging over a grand for a handbag. Now it's 'masterchef judge' Jay Rayner - the doyenne of Guardian-reading food snobs - who is telling the poor they should pay more for their dinner:

Families need to pay more for food and have become 'far too used to paying too little', Masterchef judge Jay Rayner told MPs today.

The food critic and author told a parliamentary committee that food was too cheap to support British farmers.

He said: 'We pay too little. We're far too used to paying too little. And the only way we have at our disposal, I think, to secure a robust food supply is by investing in British farming and that does mean consumers pay more and look for that label.'

Rayner even explained that food poverty was nothing to do with real poverty:

'Yes, we do need to pay more for food but if you focus on a thing called food poverty then you're not going to be looking at the bigger picture involving the whole population.'

So we're to have more expensive food because British farmers can't compete with farmers somewhere else in producing the cheap food that people want to buy. And Rayner - who has no qualifications on this matter besides having a famous mum and a cushy job being paid by newspapers and magazines to eat overpriced restaurant food - latches on the familiar set of supposed concerns - the size of the supermarkets, the concept of 'food security' and some sort of wibble about sustainability.

Food security is simply protectionism rebadged - we invent scary stories about how somehow we'll not be able to feed ourselves because of all that cheap food made somewhere else in the world and use those stories to justify trade barriers, protectionism and subsidy. Then, because the Asians and Africans who could produce all that fabulous cheap food don't due to protectionism, all Jay Rayner's pals on the Guardian and Channel 4 wangle trips to see the poor black people and to explain why evil western capitalism has condemned them to an eternal struggle against absolute poverty.

Let's be clear. Cheap food is a good thing. There is nothing at all that is wrong with you and me not having to pay as much to put food on the table. It is gross and immoral for rich people like Jay Rayner to say to poor people that they should have less food because they'd rather protect a few uneconomic farmers. Rayner has never had to make the choice between putting the heating on or having a meal - yet he wants to force that choice onto still more people. And Rayner isn't scratting on a Zambian farm hoping that the rains don't fail so he can feed his family - the other sort of uneconomic agriculture that the protectionism he espouses acts to sustain.

Rather than Rayner's snobbery and environmental protectionism, we should embrace the opportunity of cheap food - break down the barriers, encourage mass production and deliver nore people the wonderful benefits that come from cheap, abundent food in fantastic variety that we (mostly) enjoy in the UK. Above all can we stop saying - on clothes, on food, on energy - that making it more expensive is a good idea. It really, really isn't.

...

Why urban agriculture isn't the solution to anything...

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We're supposed to get all agitated about food miles and to see growing food in cities as the solution with the countryside left to wild animals and strange bearded men with banjos and pick-up trucks. The truth is, as ever with environ-loon wet dreams, that this makes absolutely no sense at all:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

This is from an article by Pierre Desrochers Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto where he explores five reasons why urban agriculture won't succeed (and the reference to 19th Century Parisians growing pineapples in horse muck is especially delicious).

....

Tim Farron and the illusory wool boom...

Like Tim Farron, I represent a lot of sheep (although these are now going for economic reasons to be replaced with beef cattle and horses) so I'm always struck by his strange and limited connection to economic reality:

Tim Farron, South Lakes MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary hill farming group, said: "We need to do all we can to support our farming industry, particularly in the uplands where life can be a real struggle. This support and funding could make a massive difference to upland farmers throughout Cumbria and help show the next generation that there is a real future in a career in farming."

OK there's some votes in this for Tim but is he really saying that there is a 'career' in upland farming when - a breath earlier - we read this:

An upland farmer earns, on average, only £6,000 a year, which has led to a number of people leaving the industry.

Six grand-a-year! That's half the minimum wage and Tim Farron thinks that this is some sort of sustainable industry? There's more - despite a (rather illusory) 'boom', here's the economics of upland sheep farming explained:

Will Rawling, chairman of Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association, said he was getting about 50p a fleece. It costs him 70p to have each animal sheared; bundling and transport fees take the total cost per sheep up to about £1.50, three times what he gets back. 

To be fair the article also says most farmers are "breaking even" but it does seem that, not only isn't there a boom, but farming sheep on the fells isn't a viable business. If Tim Farron had said this and continued with 'but we need to find ways to continue the job, done by hill farmers at the moment, of caring for the fells', I would be with him. But he didn't, he simply called, like the good liberal, for price fixing.

....

So these posh lefties think food is too cheap?

Yes folks that's right - the favoured Sunday read of the left-wing establishment thinks you all should pay more for your food:

Here we come to the uncomfortable core of the problem. Price is the key factor in our behaviour with food and food may, simply, be too cheap. Certainly, in Britain it is cheaper than at any time in history: we spend less than 10% of household income on food and drink. In 1950, we spent around 25%. In the developing world, 50% or more of income is spent on food. Tellingly, Britain spends less than any other country in Europe. 

Now I think this is brilliant - and it could be better still if we'd only dump all the daft protectionism - but it seems the lefties don't - they want taxes to make food more expensive (accompanied by higher benefits and a 'living wage' so the poor can still afford to eat):

An alternative to voluntary change is to tax the food industry in just proportion to the damage it causes. Another idea gaining ground across Europe is for a sugar tax – the cheap processed foods and soft drinks that carry the largest profit margins (and which are a key cause of obesity) depend hugely on sugar for their appeal. Food price rises would result and the supermarkets' vast profits might have to take a hit. Those who would really suffer are the poor and their children and that is a challenge to be met fairly with a living wage, not by caps on benefits or food banks.

I would smile indulgently at this drivel but it makes me really angry that these self-righteous, middle-class lefties presume to believe that cheap food is a bad thing. It isn't, it is unquestionably a good thing. It means we can spend our money on other things - things a little further up Maslow's jolly old hierarchy. You know like art, music, holidays and antique-effect wooden furniture for our farmhouse kitchens. The sort of things that Observer editorialists take for granted.

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A "Grocery Code Adjudicator" won't save a single hill farm but will increase food prices for the poor

First my usual disclaimer when writing about food – I’m no particular friend or fan of supermarkets, I like high quality, artisan-produced food and am an enthusiast for the new retail systems of farm shop, farmers market and veg box. But I don’t believe that these systems should succeed because government has fixed things in their favour, I think it wrong to deny others choice because foodies like me can influence the agenda.

And, while I’m about all this, food production is not undertaken for the benefit of the producer but for the benefit of the consumer. I know it seems daft that we need reminding of this but we surely do – here’s Liberal Democrat MP, Michael Moore:

“Over the years, supermarkets have held our local farmers over a barrel and it’s time for this injustice to be tackled and for the farmers, who produce the food we all enjoy, to be paid a fair price for their produce.

“I am extremely pleased that as a result of Liberal Democrats working in Government, legislation will now be introduced this parliament to bring in a Groceries Code Adjudicator.

I note your quizzical look – how does this represent acting on behalf of the producer? Surely Mr Moore is targeting the rapacious supermarket, this won’t affect us as food consumers, will it? I guess that the answer is ‘yes’ – by raising prices (which is what Mr Moore means by a “fair price”) you raise costs to the supermarket, costs that will be passed straight onto the consumer. Unless of course, the supermarket can go and buy it somewhere else in the world where there isn’t a “Groceries Code Adjudicator” to beat them up over some random judgement of a “fair price”.

If the supplier cannot produce the desired product for the price that suits the customer – and remember that those supermarkets pressing down on suppliers to lower prices are doing so, at least in part, for our benefit – then one of two things will happen:

1.       The price will rise to allow the producer to cover his costs (this will happen where no-one or very few can meet the price demanded), or:

2.       The price will be met by someone in the market and the customer will be supplied

What the campaigners for a “Groceries Code Adjudicator” want to do is raise farm gate prices – to force supermarkets and food manufacturers to pay more:

Referencing the recent announcement of a cut of 2 pence per litre (ppl) in the price paid to dairy farmers for milk by four of the major processors: Dairy Crest, Robert Wiseman, Arla and Muller, which will exploit these farmers to the tune of up to £20,000 per year, Tim (Farron) praised plans for a referee, who will have the power to protect farmers.

Look at it this way instead, rather than this “exploiting” the farmer, it could just as accurately be described as “benefitting” the consumer. After all, that price cut passes through the production chain until it lands in lower food bills for ordinary people. Yet, as the advocates of the “Grocery Code Adjudicator” say, this proposal is:

...backed by all the major parties, and a draft Bill has been examined by two select committees. This means it should pass through Parliament quickly and without controversy.

I find it odd that, at a time when the economy is in a deep hole, when ordinary people are struggling to pay their way, where we even have reports of families being unable to put food on the table – at a time of hardship we are proposing to introduce rules that will result in higher food prices. And not just higher prices – after all us foodies already pay more for the posh stuff – but increased costs targeted specifically at the poorest in society.

And the saddest thing in all this is that the Grocery Code Adjudicator – whoever he or she may be – won’t stop the continuing decline in farm businesses and especially the sort of farm business championed by Tim Farron and Michael Moore. These proposals will be followed by further calls for more protection, more support and greater subsidy – and yet the industry will continue to decline, the farms will continue to consolidate and the nature of the business will continue to change.

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