Wednesday, 21 2007
My data, your data, whose data?
I blogged some time ago about the dangers of sharing data with the Government through its Whole Farm Approach. Not only is its data protection statement completely inadequate, it is important to understand what happens over time.
Today’s Government initiative to collect “helpful information” quickly accumulates large quantities of commercial and personal data. In due course the scheme is replaced, officials move on, a new department takes over and nobody is quite sure what was important. An official request comes in from a “partner organisation” that doesn’t really need to know, the data is submitted in its entirety without protection, its inadvertently published and once out becomes a matter of public record.
The small matter of the loss of 25 million personal records (mine and my children’s and perhaps yours too) by HMRC doesn’t therefore come as a huge surprise; we have become culturally complacent about data in the digital age. If Inland Revenue procedures are so lax as to allow a lowly official complete access to copy and distribute the child benefit database, what hope the security of our data elsewhere?
Wednesday, 14 2007
Food for all?
Yesterday on The World at One, Professor Lang clearly articulated what we in the industry have been saying for some time; we need to start thinking about supporting a productive agriculture in the UK. Its not just that the days of cheap food supplies are coming to an end, the days of secure food supplies are becoming threatened.
Climate change coupled with rising demand for agricultural commodities for both food and energy are putting huge pressure on supplies. It is good news therefore that the Government is looking into the question of food security although it remains to be seen whether Defra's thinking has advanced since its recent paper
“Food Security and the UK” published December 2006 and about which I have already commented.
Here it argues that self sufficiency is unimportant and that free trade in foods will always provide us with food security. But what if that food is not available? Surely a reasonable degree of self sufficiency is a prerequisite to food security?
Thursday, 8 2007
Fields, Floods, Flooding
According to recent analysis by the BBC’s “Costing the earth” and The Times, farming is partly to blame for this summer’s floods. Apparently:
- and all of these are contributing to flooding. Its pretty damning stuff except that its complete nonsense.
Farmers have been draining their land since Roman times, but there has been no recent increase - quite the opposite - poor profitability has prevented essential maintenance.
Hedgerow length has been increasing for the last 15 years and there is now more woodland in the UK than at any time in the last 1000 years. Unmentioned there are also hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland in environmental schemes and set-aside – all of which are beneficial for flood management.
Soil compaction is largely a problem of the past. When the great mechanisation of agriculture began in the 1960’s, tractors used narrow tyres that did cause compaction. Tractors may be bigger now but the tyres they drive on are dramatically bigger. Today’s low ground pressure tyres cause minimal compaction.
With a few exceptions, fields don’t get cultivated in May and June. This is the period when crops are in the ground and growing most vigorously, utilising more rainfall than at any other time of year.
Tramlines of course still exist in fields. But whereas 12 metre spacing was the norm 20 years ago, the average now is probably over 24 metres – in other words they are less than half the problem they once were.
A quick check at livestock numbers in the farming today section of this site will show that over the past 15 years livestock numbers have declined markedly. This has been particularly so in southern areas (generally drought prone) that were badly hit by the flooding.
Easy as it is to try to blame agriculture, the analysis doesn’t stack up. If you get as much as 5 inches of rain in a day, and over the summer period the rainfall breaks all the records – its going to flood.
Soggy work!
Wednesday, 7 2007
The Green Belt
Yesterday the BBC’s “You and Yours” discussed the Green Belt.
The Natural England representative on the program said that he was happy to see biodiverse greenbelt but, wanted less of it where it was monoculture agriculture.
For the agency that’s charged with knowing England’s natural environment, the representative seemed somewhat ill informed - monoculture agriculture died out in the 1980’s. Still maybe this is what we should expect.
So let’s not reflect on a prospective UK population of 70 million, tumbling self-sufficiency, nor on droughts, floods, failed crops and soaring world food prices brought on by population growth and demand for biofuels; No: let’s just hope that somewhere else in the world there’s space for productive agriculture that has sufficient surplus to meet our food needs.
Has it really come to this?
