Dirty Business
I’ve missed two Friday blogs so far. No excuses other than life, my client in Cyprus has a project deadline at the end of July which makes things feel more busy, and I am also working on another internal project at work which I really want to succeed because I think it will help fix a real problem within our immediate team and it has remained unresolved for too long.
Excuses out of the way. Here is a short note I wrote about soil.
If I say climate change I tend to think of certain things, global warming, temperatures increasing, more random weather patterns, rainforest destruction, fossil fuels, petrol price, electric cars, and recycling.
My future prediction is that soil quality will become as great an impending disaster as climate change. This is already known to environmentalists, but I don’t think its in the public conscious yet, but I predict that it will enter it soon.
We already know that intensive farming is contributing to pollution, destruction of rivers and rain forests and methane gas. But it’s effect on soil is also catastrophic.
We believe that we can artificially manufacture nutrients and put them back into the soil but this is not true. Some people are saying that we have limited harvests left. Some say less than 60.
We buy into a myth that farmers are there to look after the land when in fact nothing is further from the truth.
Farmers were noticeably quiet during the EU referendum and for good reason. The majority of farmers knew that the Common Agricultural Policy served no one’s interests bar a few wealthy land owners and large French farms.
Of course the BBC could find farmers who were worried by Brexit and for good reason. A trading block with your closet neighbour is a good idea when it comes to selling them food. But most farmers knew that leaving the EU gave the U.K. a unique opportunity to put in place a better system of payments to farmers. One that encourages environmental protection, land access, lower use of chemicals, stricter controls over pollution, higher animal welfare. So many farmers stayed silent and did not get involved.
Everyone, including Brexiteers knew that to have a better system in the UK we’d need high calibre politicians and in reality, that was always unlikely to happen so I didn’t hold out much hope that leaving the EU would improve things, but at least it felt possible, more possible than being in the EU.
And so it came to pass. The UK Government introduced 3 replacement schemes to CAP, one allocating £800million to go to farmers who under the banner of “Landscape Recovery” known to you and I as re-wilding. This is something really positive for the U.K. and the environment.
The Knepp rewilding project that is the subject of the book Wilding has shown how an approach of broadly leaving nature to its own devices can have a significantly positive environmental impact in a very short length of time. The kind of time scale we need in order to reach net zero emissions by 2050, the point at which negative clmatic events are likely to be seriously disruptive for us all.
Those positive effects I can remember from reading the book include how the scale of carbon capture of the land could, on a large enough scale, capture a large part of CO2 emissions we have emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. This is in addition to the reduction in pollution from not using chemicals on the land and the massive increase in soil fertility.
And then we get to Partygate, followed by a vote of no confidence in the PM, followed by two Conservative politicians being involved in things that we would once have called scandals, which we now barely notice because its just how these people behave, one MP was found to be having sex with boys, the other was watching tractor based pornography in the House of Commons chamber (his finger slipped). Both resigned leading to 2 by-elections.
The tractor porn MP was MP for Tiverton and Devon. Farmer heartland.
Separate to this the current MP who is the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is George Eustice, commonly know in Private Eye as George Useless. George previously stood for election as a UKIP candidate, but is now an MP in Cornwall, Farmer heartland.
George grew up in Cornwall on the family farm, Trevaskis farm. This is currently run by his brother Paul. Farms are struggling we’re told and the cost of living crisis and covid must have made that so much worse, but in the last financial year the farm increased its profits and decreased its debts. How many other people paid off their credit cards and got a pay rise?
And how did George try and woo the Farmers heartland before the by-election? He virtually scrapped the Landscape Recovery fund, reducing it to £50million. Something that happened almost unnoticed in the press, too busy talking about Partygate, Ukraine, men who identify as women, and now fundamentalist Christians in the USA who want every pregnancy started to be allowed to continue, no matter what. I would put a link to stories about this fund being scaled back but I can barely find any.
This isn’t the first time George has kicked nature. The Conservative Government pledged not to reverse the EU ban on use of neonicotinoid pesticides, implicated in the rapid decline of pollinators, but George broke that pledge in 2021. George doesn’t like nature apparently.
And so it has come to pass. An opportunity to improve the system of payments to farmers is passing us by. An opportunity to improve the environmental impact on the land has been lost.
And as if to punish Brexit voters further, the EU moved to half the use of pesticides, a spokesman saying:
“If we lose soil fertility, if soil erosion and degradation continue, that is going to be a major impact on our agricultural output…”
Pointing out that soil degradation already costs Europe around 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) a year in lost agricultural production.
Soil degradation caused by intensive farming and the use and over use of chemicals is a silent catastrophe waiting to be discovered by the wider public. Soil is important to our survival, as George Monbiot says… its time we stopped treating it like dirt.
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