Farming and Food

I was debating this week adding a page about the Media to my Utopia site. A much neglected part of this site that I had planned to build on during this year.

I have changed from the media and instead added a page abut about farming.

This is because in the news during the week, I have seen in the week the NFU talking about the importance of “food security” for the U.K. in the face of grain export issues from Ukraine.

I agree with the NFU, food security is important. But I suspect the NFU would totally disagree with my understanding of it.

If food security is important, I think you would decide what is the best use of every hectare of land in terms of calories and health value for a population.

I suspect the NFU think that food security is about giving money to large farmers currently producing meat.

If you looked at land use in terms of the calories supplied, then it makes no sense to grow crops on land that you then feed to animals to produce calories for humans. Especially when the calories from those animals are less than the crops.

And if the calories to feed herds of animals is grown at the expense of cutting down rain forest to grow the crop thr. It’s even worse.

So food security means; high yield, low environmental impact.

So I have updated the Utopia manifesto section of the website.

This subject links closely to my blogs about education because I think more children should be excited about leaving school and farming land in this way than going to university or working in banking in the city.

It also links to my recent blog about soil as food security means not losing the value within your soil and not artificially raising it with chemicals whilst destroying it in the long term.

The farming I would promote would have so many positive side effects.

• Reduced flooding.

• Decreased river pollution (less animal shit in the rivers).

• Increased carbon capture from land.

All that would be along side more food security… more British food available, which is what the NFU say they want.

But will we do this, or is the current NFU demand for food security nothing more than a way of keeping things as they are and ensuring that large wealthy land owners get richer?

The question we can always ask ourselves is this. Is everything fine as we are, or do we need change? As long as no one is going hungry right now, food inflation is under control, farmers are fine and not struggling and we are not facing environmental disaster, then we don't need to change or do anything, just carry on as we are.