Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The UK is still beholden to EU emissions standards, which, like most things under the purview of the European Union, have become bureaucratic and are applied in ways that are detrimental to both efficiency and productivity, without doing a proper cost – benefit analysis.
The UK is still beholden to EU emissions standards, which, like most things under the purview of the European Union, have become bureaucratic and are applied in ways that are detrimental to both efficiency and productivity, without doing a proper cost – benefit analysis. Vehicles in high-traffic residential areas should rightly be given greater weight when it comes to pollution reduction, but should a tractor working on a farm or in the middle of a field, miles from the nearest village, be subject to the same conditions?
EU emissions regulations for non-road mobile machinery have become more and more stringent over the last decade, to the point where the demands on the technology have led to runaway costs and new machinery has essentially become emissions-regulation equipment with an engine attached. The cost of emissions-regulation technology can account for 20–30% of the total list price for a new vehicle such as a tractor, excavator, bulldozer, or any other type of non-road mobile machinery. The technology required to bring emissions into compliance with the Stage IV and Stage V standards places huge burdens on manufacturers and end users. Failures of the emission-monitoring components result in large warranty bills for manufacturers, which are pushed onto end users through eye-watering extended warranty programmes. Those who cannot afford these, or whose machine has reached an age where the manufacturer’s warranty has expired, can be left with a ticking time bomb. A single component failure can result in bills of several thousand pounds which, for a small family farm often with only a single tractor, can cause significant financial hardship.
Consequently, a black market has emerged where end users are paying up to £1,000 for ‘jailbroken’ software that overrides all the legal manufacturer emissions controls. This carries the risk of fines of up to £50,000 if discovered by the DVSA and successfully prosecuted. The reason many are increasingly willing to take this risk, however, is that, lurking under the bonnet of the emissions technology, lies the engine derate. When an issue is detected on the SCR system that indicates emissions are not being sufficiently reduced, a succession of derates is triggered. The first is a low-level inducement of no less than 25% of engine torque across the speed range. This then progresses to a severe derate of up to 50% engine torque. This essentially turns the most critical asset on a farm into an expensive paperweight – not by unforeseen mechanical failure, but by engineered design, to ensure compliance with the edicts from Brussels.
The Americans are already grappling with a similar predicament caused by their own emissions standards through the Environmental Protection Agency. As of August 2025, the Trump administration announced new guidance that allows farmers and truckers to revise software to prevent sudden speed and power losses caused by SCR system faults. This situation, born from Net Zero climate fanaticism, is undoubtedly contributing to the increase in food prices, which is being keenly felt by the public at the till. New tractor registrations in the UK fell 17% in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024 – the lowest number of recorded registrations since 1998. There are those who have rightly positioned themselves as opponents of the Net Zero dogma. Delivering on this opposition would mean an agricultural policy that restores sense and practicality to the industry, slashing the cost of new machinery and delivering a boost to manufacturing.
An unrealised benefit of the 2016 Brexit vote should be a new British emissions standard for non-road mobile machinery that sees a return to something closer to the Stage IIIb (2013) regulations, which are primarily sensible, practical and affordable.
t’s a constant battle,” says Tim Young. He and his family have been tracking the rainfall on their Norfolk farm since 1976, and the data shows the last six years have seen two-thirds the amount of rain compared with previous years. The lack of water has become the number one risk to Young’s business.
This summer has seen record-breaking climate induced heatwaves scorch much of Europe, which combined with droughts and “apocalyptic” wildfireshas made farming virtually impossible. France has faced down fires that its president, Emmanuel Macron, called the worst since the second world war and on Wednesday half of England was declared officially in drought, with July expected to be the driest on record after winter floods, according to the Environment Agency. So how are farmers bearing up under the pressure?
“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”
Do took over the farm in 2018 and adopted organic farming practices in the hope to build resilience against the climate crisis. But with the climate changing much faster than most predicted, Do says her farm is just not able to adapt quickly enough. “It’s too fast. It’s too big,” she says.
…
Prof Pete Falloon, the Met Office’s science lead on food security, who is advising the government on the resilience of our food systems, says a movement to more regenerative approaches, better flood management, water storage and using crop varieties that are more heat or drought tolerant is essential.
Winter saw floods, but Summer is dry and the farmers have no water for their crops.
I’m pretty sure there is this thing, a reservoir, which can collect water when it rains, then allow that water to be used when the rain stops. Unfortunately Britain doesn’t have enough of them.
Running Dry: How the UK Can Reverse Decades of Underinvestment in Reservoirs
bluechain
Mar 18, 2025
4 min read
Updated: May 19, 2025
The UK’s reservoir infrastructure has seen minimal investment in recent decades. The last significant construction being the Banbury Flood Storage Area, completed in 2012 and you have to go back another two decades to the construction of the Carsington reservoir in 1992 for the previous investment in storage capacity in the UK. This stagnation is concerning, especially considering the National Infrastructure Commission’s projection of a daily supply-demand gap of four billion litres by 2050.
Maybe if the British Government stopped wasting so much money on net zero, they’d be able to address chronic water storage capacity issues.
As for adopting organic farming practices to make the farm more resilient, I’ll leave readers to comment on that absurdity. I’d love to know what the nutrient levels were in that soil which can’t grow crops.
Back in the real world, away from backwards places which place climate zealotry ahead of taking care of food production, crop yields are doing just fine.
But you know, if climate change was no threat to food production the climate zealots wouldn’t have anything to scare people with, so they clutch at straws, play emotional anecdotes rather than big picture facts. And sadly, some of their audience is still falling for their nonsense.
The EU’s environmental policies for agriculture, centered on the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, have sparked ongoing tensions with farmers. These aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, pesticide use, and biodiversity loss while promoting organic farming and nature restoration. Farmers argue the rules raise costs, cut yields, add bureaucracy, and undermine competitiveness against imports that face lighter standards.
The EU’s environmental policies for agriculture, centered on the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, have sparked ongoing tensions with farmers.
These aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, pesticide use, and biodiversity loss while promoting organic farming and nature restoration. Farmers argue the rules raise costs, cut yields, add bureaucracy, and undermine competitiveness against imports that face lighter standards.
Tja, er is geen stikstofcrisis alleen een slecht stikstofbeleid en de notoire stikstof procedeer idioot zoals beschreven in "De stikstoffuik" .. het eerder verschenen boek van Thierry en Lidewij geeft ook alle feiten weer .. pic.twitter.com/1v0e9aLa2I
— 🐝 awake, free as an 🦅, Right over Left Everytime (@ArmandvanWesten) June 22, 2026
A post on X on Tuesday by Dutch commentator Armand van Westen that has been circulating revisits the nitrogen debate in Dutch agriculture. Responding to a video by physicist and science journalist Arnout Jaspers – author of De Stikstoffuik (The Nitrogen Trap), the 2023 book that became a number-one bestseller in the Netherlands – van Westen makes a point that’s as simple as it is explosive: there is no real stikstofcrisis.
‘Stikstof‘ has become shorthand for this entire heated debate about nitrogen pollution from farming, EU nature rules and the clash between environmental protection and agricultural and economic interests. The Dutch Government aims to reduce nitrogen deposition on ‘nitrogen-sensitive’ Natura 2000 protected areas (part of the EU-wide network of nature sites) so that it falls below ‘critical loads’, with targets set in national law following EU obligations. The subtitle of Jaspers’ book says it plainly: “Politicians in thrall to the eco-lobby.”
As Jaspers painstakingly documents, stikstof (literally meaning ‘choking substance’) is a crisis of defective regulation and runaway litigation masquerading as an ecological emergency. The former minister Ronald Plasterk – a biologist – endorsed Jaspers’s work as “a sensible book full of sober facts that demonstrates the absurdity of the policy”. The Dutch Government, for its part, was so rattled that the Minister for Nature and Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, was formally pressed by parliament to issue a written rebuttal of another critical work on the same file.
That other work was Niemand in de Cockpit (Nobody in the Cockpit), a stikstof case study by Thierry Baudet, the jurist and Forum for Democracy leader, co-authored with biochemist Lidewij de Vos. Their conclusion – reached via publicly available measurements and verifiable data – is that biodiversity in Dutch Natura 2000 areas is broadly stable: trees are healthy, bird populations are in order, air quality is good, and of 521 species associated with the relevant ecosystems, only seven have declined in the past two decades in ways plausibly linked to nitrogen deposition. Those seven, the authors note, “play no crucial role in the relevant ecosystems and are still found in abundance elsewhere in the Netherlands and Europe”.
The book’s central thesis is that successive Dutch governments – blinded by models and laboratory experiments rather than empirical field measurements and captured by environmental lobbies that substitute litigation for evidence – have driven their country into a wholly self-manufactured catastrophe. Nobody is flying the plane. The cockpit is empty.
Van Westen’s post, amplifying Jaspers’s video, is a small but emblematic moment: a Dutch citizen pointing at two book-length accumulations of documented, peer-reviewed, publicly available evidence and saying, simply, that the emperor has no clothes. What is remarkable is not the observation itself – it has been made by scientists, economists and farmers’ advocates for years. What is remarkable is the institutional machinery that continues to grind against it, undeterred by political revolt, electoral rebuke or the belated admission by the IPCC itself that the catastrophist scenario underpinning two decades of green policy was never scientifically plausible. The inquisition, it seems, does not require a factual basis. It requires only institutional momentum.
‘Follow the Science’
Let us begin with the science, since the Net Zero faithful forever insist on invoking it as their unassailable authority. For the better part of two decades, the most extreme emissions pathway conjured by climate modellers – RCP8.5, and its successor SSP5-8.5 – served as the master blueprint for virtually every restrictive climate and energy policy enacted across the EU and UK. Governments shuttered coal plants, throttled North Sea extraction, mandated ruinously expensive offshore wind arrays and subjected farmers across the continent to nitrogen constraints so punishing as to render viable agriculture impossible.
All of it rested, directly or indirectly, on the apocalyptic projections generated by a scenario that assumed global coal consumption would quintuple by century’s end – a trajectory so divorced from physical reality that, as the Eos journal has recently confirmed, the IPCC’s own modelling community has now formally moved to eliminate SSP5-8.5 from the upcoming AR7 assessment, declaring it “implausible”. It was, as GB News aptly characterised it, an admission by climate scientists themselves that “the doomsday scenario is no longer believable”.
This is not a minor housekeeping exercise. RCP8.5 was cited more than 45,000 times in academic literature and deployed routinely by the World Economic Forum, the European Commission and every European climate minister from Stockholm to Madrid. The scenario was never designed as a ‘business as usual’ projection – it was always an extreme outlier, representing outcomes that more than 90% of baseline scenario literature considered impossible even absent climate policy. Yet, as Carbon Brief concedes, it “came to be widely referred to as the ‘business as usual’ outcome in hundreds of different papers”. The policies that dismembered European industry, immiserated pensioners through energy poverty and drove farmers from their land were all enacted under the shadow of a phantom apocalypse.
The beleaguered Dutch farmer
Into this context of admitted scientific revision comes the fate of the Dutch farmer. The Netherlands – the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, a country that transformed a modest land area into an astonishing engine of food production through ingenuity, capital and generations of expertise – is being systematically dismantled. The culprit is nitrogen policy, or more precisely, the EU’s Habitats Directive as interpreted by Dutch courts, which determined in 2019 that ammonia and nitrogen oxide emissions from the livestock sector were incompatible with obligations to protect designated nature reserves.
The government’s response was to demand cuts of up to 70% in nitrogen emissions from agriculture – a sector that produces 46% of the country’s nitrogen output, but which was to bear a disproportionate share of the burden while industry and aviation were treated with considerably more indulgence.
Up to 3,000 farms faced forced buyout. The Dutch dairy cattle population faced a reduction of between 167,000 and 450,000 head – up to 30% of the total – by 2030. As Jaspers notes, the threshold for triggering these existential consequences is so sensitive that a single bird’s droppings per hectare per year can formally breach the permitted limit. The absurdity is not rhetorical. It is regulatory.
The political consequence was the explosive rise of the BoerBurgerBeweging – BBB, the Farmer-Citizen Movement – founded in 2019 by agricultural journalist Caroline van der Plas in direct response to the protests by Dutch farmers against onerous regulatory burdens. In March 2023, in one of the most seismic upsets in modern Dutch political history, BBB swept the provincial elections, winning the largest vote share of any party across all 12 provinces. Van der Plas described the nitrogen regulations bluntly as “dogma dictated from The Hague”.
By 2024, BBB had entered government as a coalition partner, securing a shift from mandatory to voluntary farm buyouts and delaying the 2030 nitrogen target to 2035 – minor concessions wrested from a machine that would not otherwise have yielded an inch. When the Schoof cabinet collapsed in June 2025 after the PVV withdrew over asylum policy, BBB was reduced to caretaker status. Greenpeace then moved in January 2025 for the judicial kill, with the District Court of The Hague ordering the Dutch state to meet nitrogen reduction targets by 2030 under threat of a €10 million fine. The ratchet never loosens.
The great European farmer revolt
The parallel trajectory across the European continent has been equally instructive. In Germany, the once-dominant Green Party – whose jeans-and-sneakers figurehead Joschka Fischer had turned environmental politics into a quasi-religious movement since the 1980s, and whose Robert Habeck nursed fantasies of the chancellorship as recently as 2024 – has been routed at the polls by an electorate that has had enough of punitive green policies. Alternative für Deutschland has become the second-largest party in the Bundestag, energised in no small part by the economic carnage wrought by Habeck’s energy policy.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National won the 2024 European elections on a platform that included explicit opposition to the EU’s Net Zero agenda. In Britain, Reform UK under Nigel Farage has brought scepticism of Net Zero into the mainstream of political debate with an electoral force that the Conservative Party spent four years failing to summon.
The peasants, in short, are revolting – as I noted in my Forbes article of February 2024, which surveyed the opening salvoes of the great European farmer unrest. Across France, Germany, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands, tractors blockaded motorways, Brussels was blanketed in manure and the political class was at last forced to acknowledge that real people, growing real food, cannot be treated as impediments to a bureaucratic green utopia without consequence.
The Net Zero juggernaut unfazed
None of this has, however, produced even a flicker of self-examination among the ideology’s keepers. The Net Zero establishment has responded to political reversal not with recalibration but with escalation – and with the increasingly undisguised weaponisation of every available institutional lever against those who point out inconvenient empirical realities.
The Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who brought the farmers’ cause to international attention through appearances on Fox News and her own formidable social media presence, found her X account abruptly and without explanation permanently suspended in March 2023 – only to be restored after a public outcry. In January 2026, the British Home Office revoked her Electronic Travel Authorisation, barring her from the UK on the grounds that her presence was not “conducive to the public good” – a determination that arrived, with suspicious convenience, three days after she published criticism of Prime Minister Keir Starmer on X.
A peer-reviewed article in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research – a journal of criminology, note – classified scepticism of nitrogen reduction policy as a species of “disinformation” exhibiting “themes from climate change denial”. That is the official academic verdict: to question whether forcing the closure of Dutch farms is scientifically necessary or proportionate is to engage in something akin to crime.
This is the Orwellian intellectual climate in which Europeans now operate. A scenario formally disowned by the IPCC’s own modelling community underpinned two decades of civilisation-scale economic disruption. The scientists who built that scenario have now acknowledged it is not plausible. But the policies it generated – the closed farms, the throttled industries, the unaffordable energy bills, the banned voices – remain firmly in place, enforced by an alliance of activist courts, captured regulators and a political class whose entire identity has been invested in the Net Zero project, alongside gender and ethnic identity politics and the acceptance of mass immigration. The Net Zero ideologues keep doubling down even as the economic dysfunction spirals around them.
The IEA – that erstwhile temple of green ambition, whose 2021 ‘Net Zero by 2050’ report declared that no new oil and gas fields should ever be developed – has, under the pressure of altered political realities, quietly reinstated its ‘Current Policies Scenario’ that it had abandoned in 2019 at the behest of Brussels. Its ‘World Energy Outlook 2025’ now concedes that global oil demand does not peak before 2050. Even this modest return to realism has been driven not by any new scientific revelation but by the brute geopolitical fact of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the threat of US defunding. The pretence of energy realism has returned to the IEA not because the facts have changed, but because power and funding have.
Meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission – the institution whose European Green Deal provided the Brussels-level scaffolding for the nitrogen apocalypse visited on Dutch farming – shows no corresponding sign of wakening. Greenpeace litigates. Courts order. Fines loom. Farms close. Baudet and De Vos demonstrated with meticulous data that the Dutch natural world is not in crisis. Jaspers demonstrated with equal rigour that the regulations are a self-constructed trap with no basis in EU law or observed ecology. And any Dutch commentator who amplifies these findings on social media understands is labelled ‘misinfluencer’, a branding bestowed by activist researchers funded to audit the “misinformation landscape” of farmer protests.
The Dutch farmer as the canary in the coal mine
What we are witnessing is the last-ditch defence of a politico-scientific paradigm that has no empirical grounding but retains its institutional grip. The Right-of-centre parties that have proliferated across Europe – BBB, AfD, RN,Reform – did not create the conditions for their own rise. They are symptoms, not causes, of a policy regime so detached from the lived realities of ordinary Europeans that the latter had no alternative but to organise politically against it. The Establishment’s response has been to treat this democratic revolt not as a signal for policy correction but as evidence of disinformation requiring suppression.
The Netherlands built its agricultural prowess not through subsidy and bureaucratic licence, but through centuries of disciplined ingenuity in a country barely above sea level – a quarter of it is below sea-level. It became the world’s second-largest food exporter. And now, by administrative decree backed by activist jurisprudence and a supposed “scientific consensus“, Dutch agriculture is being systematically throttled.
Those who object, whether in a bestselling book, a parliamentary speech or a post on X, find themselves on the wrong end of criminal-law journals, Home Office border decisions, and ministerial rebuttals drafted by officials who have little time for data and rigorous analysis. The plight of the Dutch farmer today stands as a symbol not merely of the ideological intransigence of the political class, but of a broader civilisational decline.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic
The UK has accelerated solar deployment significantly. As of late 2025/early 2026, total installed solar PV capacity reached around 21–23 GW (up from ~18 GW earlier in 2025), with record additions of ~2.6 GW in 2025. Large-scale ground-mounted solar farms drove much of the growth, alongside strong rooftop uptake.
Britain is rapidly installing more solar panels. Across the country, fields that once grew wheat, barley and vegetables are now covered with glass and silicon panels stretching to the hedgerows. The Government calls this a key part of its energy plan.
Developers claim solar is affordable and bound to happen. Planning authorities, under growing pressure to approve renewable projects, often struggle to refuse them. But the main question — whether large-scale solar truly suits the UK’s geography, climate and energy needs — is rarely explored in detail. When it is, the findings are worrying.
This argument is not opposed to solar energy itself. Instead, it asks for a clear look at what solar can and cannot do in a northern, Atlantic-facing country. Policies built on incomplete information can have lasting effects, even after the panels are removed.
The wrong tool for the job
Every energy technology has places where it works best. Geothermal suits Iceland, and hydropower suits Norway. Large-scale solar is most effective in places with strong sunlight, long winter days and steady seasons, such as the Mojave Desert, the edge of the Sahara or southern Spain. The United Kingdom does not have these conditions.
Britain is located between the 50th and 61st parallels north. In December and January, southern England gets about seven hours of daylight and Scotland gets less than six. But not all daylight helps solar panels. Britain’s Atlantic weather brings many clouds, dim light and a low winter sun that hits panels at bad angles so they produce much less power. On the darkest winter days, a solar farm might generate only 3% to 5% of its rated capacity.
This problem would be easier if electricity demand stayed steady all year, but it does not. Britain’s energy use changes with the seasons and this pattern is the opposite of when solar panels work best. People and businesses use much more electricity from November to February for heating, lighting, cooking and industry. The coldest times, which are risky for the elderly and vulnerable, happen when solar power is at its lowest. When demand jumps during a January cold snap, it is met by gas turbines, battery reserves and power imported from Europe, not by solar panels.
This is a basic structural problem, not just an engineering challenge that can be solved. It is caused by Britain’s location and weather. No solar panel, now or in the future, can make British winters sunnier. The gap between when solar produces power and when the UK needs it most will not go away.
However, these numbers do not show that summer is when energy demand is lowest. Mild weather, longer days and less industrial activity mean the grid is under less pressure. Extra solar power during these months can cause problems. Electricity prices can go negative, generators may be paid to cut output and the grid has to handle power it cannot store. Cheap electricity at the wrong time is not as useful as electricity when it is needed.
Meanwhile, the storage systems that could bridge the seasonal gap, such as batteries or other technologies that store summer surplus for winter use, do not exist at the needed scale. There is no realistic timeline for building them. The truth is that solar in the UK creates extra energy it cannot always use and not enough when it is most needed, and this pattern repeats every year.
The land that cannot be unfarmed
Let’s put the energy calculations aside for a moment and think about what is really being lost.
Britain’s farmland covers about 16.8 million hectares, which is around 70% of the country’s land. Of this, about 6.2 million hectares is arable land that grows cereals, vegetables, oilseed and other food crops. Within this limited amount, Grade 1 and Grade 2 soils — the most productive, able to grow many crops reliably and at high yields — make up only a small and truly irreplaceable part. Once these are lost to development, they do not return.
This land is not just an economic asset but also vital to food security. Given that the UK now imports about half its food, losing more domestic production makes this dependency, which is already a strategic risk, even worse.
Solar developers clearly prefer this type of land. It is usually flat, open, well-drained and already connected to roads and the power grid — features that make it great for farming and, as it turns out, for solar panels. Because of Government contracts and planning policies that support renewables, this land can earn much more as a solar farm than as a working farm. Landowners are making logical choices based on these incentives, but the policies themselves are not logical.
When a field becomes a solar farm, the loss is not temporary. Compacted soil, altered drainage, reduced microbial activity and 25 years without farming leave the land in worse shape. Restoring its ability to grow food is not something that can be done quickly. The UK is making a permanent trade, giving up long-term food security for an energy technology that is not suited to providing power when it is most needed.
Floating solar — from fields to lakes
If losing farmland to solar development is a slow and obvious problem, the new push to put solar panels on Britain’s lakes and reservoirs could be a faster and less visible issue.
Floating photovoltaic systems, known as ‘floatovoltaics’ in the industry, are being promoted as the next step. They avoid the farmland debate, can be placed on existing reservoirs and promise low-cost energy. Industry supporters and some researchers mention possible benefits, such as reduced water evaporation and fewer algal blooms. The Government has welcomed the idea. The case may sound reasonable, but it is not.
Scientific studies on the ecological impact of floating solar show a much more troubling picture than the industry admits. Research has found that floating panels block both wind and sunlight from reaching the water, which disrupts the layers that control a lake’s circulation, oxygen levels and biological activity. This is not a minor effect. Studies have found that hypoxic conditions, or dangerously low oxygen, happen about 80% more often under floating solar installations.
Scientists have identified changes in water chemistry, such as nitrification and oxygen loss, as the most serious risks from this technology. A global survey found that floating solar arrays cover an average of 34% of a lake’s surface — a level at which effects on aquatic food chains, primary production and species makeup become difficult to predict or reverse.
The most candid admission comes from researchers who are broadly sympathetic to the technology. The lead author of a widely cited Bangor and Lancaster University study noted plainly: “We still don’t know exactly how floating panels might affect the ecosystem within a natural lake, in different conditions and locations.”
That statement of uncertainty was made while calling for more deployment. What makes this more worrying is the lack of monitoring as deployment is already happening. Surveys of floating solar operators found that only 15% had ever checked water quality. The industry is expanding a technology without measuring its ecological effects in ecosystems that took thousands of years to reach their current balance.
Britain’s lakes, reservoirs and freshwater bodies are not empty spaces waiting to be used. They are complex, productive ecosystems that support fish, migratory birds, invertebrates and the larger food chains that rely on them. Many are also sources of drinking water. Damaging their water quality or temperature balance to get a small amount of extra solar power — for all the seasonal and geographic reasons already discussed — would cause a different kind of environmental harm than building panels on a field. Fields can, at least in theory, recover. Aquatic ecosystems harmed by low oxygen and disrupted layers may not.
The incomplete balance sheet
Supporters of large-scale solar often use a simple calculation: they divide installation costs by the expected lifetime output to get a cost per kilowatt-hour that looks better than almost any other option. This number has dropped significantly over the past decade thanks to large-scale Chinese manufacturing and is often cited as the main argument for expanding solar. However, this calculation leaves out a lot.
Begin with degradation. Solar panels lose efficiency from the day they are installed. Heat cycling causes microfractures. Grit and particulate matter, particularly in agricultural settings, abrade the surface and scatter incoming light. The adhesives and encapsulants that hold panel layers together break down over time, allowing moisture ingress.
Industry-standard figures suggest a degradation rate of roughly half a per cent per year, reaching around 80% of the original output after 25 years. In a climate where output is already marginal for much of the year, that compounding degradation is not a rounding error — it meaningfully erodes the value case over the life of the installation.
More significantly, panels require maintenance. Arrays spanning tens of thousands of acres require regular inspection, cleaning, electrical testing and component replacement. Inverters — the devices that convert DC output to grid-compatible AC — have shorter lifespans than the panels themselves and must be replaced at least once during a standard installation’s life. None of these activities is free, and none is without energy or resource cost. The labour, equipment, transportation and manufacturing involved all carry real financial and material footprints, which are rarely incorporated into headline cost comparisons.
Then there is the issue of what happens when panels reach the end of their life. The UK is just starting a solar expansion that will, in the 2040s and 2050s, create a huge and predictable wave of old panels. These panels contain cadmium, lead, selenium and other hazardous materials that cannot be safely disposed of in landfills.
There is very little recycling infrastructure for solar panels. The ability to handle the large number of panels that will need processing in the future does not exist, and there is no major public investment to build it. This is a real and large problem that is almost never included in current policy costs.
Finally, there is the question of manufacturing dependency. The overwhelming majority of solar panels used in UK installations are manufactured in China, using energy-intensive industrial processes. The resources required to refine silicon, fabricate cells, assemble panels and ship them to Britain are substantial, and they carry real costs in energy and raw materials — costs that do not appear in UK energy statistics, because accounting conventions assign them to where production occurs rather than where products are consumed.
Britain’s solar panels look cheap and resource-light on the national balance sheet. The full picture of what it takes to make and deliver them is considerably more complex.
What is being crowded out
The argument here is not that solar has no place in Britain’s energy mix. On south-facing rooftops, over car parks, alongside motorways, on genuinely marginal or brownfield land, solar installations can contribute usefully to summer peak generation without consuming productive farmland or distorting land use. Appropriately sited solar is a very different proposition from industrial-scale arrays spreading across Grade 1 and Grade 2 agricultural land.
The tougher question is what political and financial resources are being spent on large-scale solar, and what is being left out as a result. The electricity grid, which is the key infrastructure connecting all types of power generation to users, needs major investment to keep up with a modern, diverse energy system.
Upgrading the grid and building truly effective large-scale storage that can hold energy — however generated — for days or weeks, not just hours, would help national energy security more than covering acres with solar panels that produce extra power on a July afternoon.
These investments are often underfunded, partly because attention and money have gone to high-profile generation projects that look good on paper but do not deliver when the country needs them most.
Every pound spent on a solar farm built on good farmland is a pound not spent on infrastructure that would really help Britain’s energy needs during the toughest times — in the dark, cold winter months.
Conclusion
The expansion of large-scale solar farming in the United Kingdom is a policy built on selective arithmetic and seasonal blindness. It counts summer megawatts without accounting for winter silence. It presents installation costs without incorporating maintenance, degradation, replacement and disposal. It treats the loss of productive farmland as an acceptable externality rather than an irreversible cost.
And now, as resistance to ground-mounted solar grows, proponents are turning to Britain’s lakes and reservoirs — proposing to extend a poorly understood technology into water bodies whose ecological integrity serves far more important purposes than energy generation.
Britain needs an honest national conversation about what its energy future actually requires — one grounded not in what is fashionable or financially convenient, but in the austere realities of northern latitude, Atlantic cloud, the non-negotiable demands of a British winter, and the irreplaceable value of the land and water we are being asked to sacrifice.
Sam Lowry is a senior mnager in the software development industry with an interest in political and social issues. His name is a pseudonym.
Yeah, global cereal production (including wheat, maize/corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and other coarse grains) reached a record high in 2024, according to data and reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and related sources.
Yeah, global cereal production (including wheat, maize/corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and other coarse grains) reached a record high in 2024, according to data and reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and related sources.
Mid-2024 forecasts pegged it at around 2,854 million tonnes, slightly above the previous year’s level and marking a new record.
Later refinements placed final or near- final estimates for 2024 production in the range of approximately 2,848– 2,853 million tonnes, still representing a peak or near-peak output.
This was driven by strong performances in coarse grains (like maize), wheat in regions such as Asia (e.g., record wheat in Pakistan), and rice nearing or hitting records (around 535–537 million tonnes milled basis).
It’s the same story with overall agricultural production, again setting a new high in 2024 – note these are at fixed prices and are therefore not distorted by inflation:
The UN are also projecting another big increase in cereal production for 2026/26:
FAO’s latest forecast for world cereal production in 2025 has been revised upward this month to 3 003 million tonnes, marking the first time the global output is estimated to surpass the 3-billion-tonne level.
Upward revisions to wheat production estimates are primarily behind the improved outlook, driven especially by Argentina, where larger-than-expected plantings and likely record yields, supported by favourable weather, are expected to result in an all-time-high harvest.
Revisions to wheat production in the European Union and the United States of America also contributed to this month’s more buoyant outlook.
Likewise, global coarse grain production has been raised, although to a lesser extent, mostly reflecting higher barley output.
As for rice, FAO has upgraded its production forecast for Indonesia since November, as official assessments in the country indicate that continued area expansions are likely to translate into a higher- than -previously-expected offseason harvest.
Coupled with improved crop prospects for Bangladesh and Japan, this revision raises the global production forecast for 2025/26 by 2.4 million tonnes to 558.8 million tonnes (milled basis).
At that level, world rice output would be 1.6 percent above the 2024/25 result and at an all- time high.
Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia are forecast to spearhead this growth, more than compensating for contractions in Madagascar, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, and the United States of America.
The long-term increase in food output has been undoubtedly driven by fossil fuels. Fertilisers have, of course, been hugely important, but maybe more important still has been the increase in productivity resulting from mechanisation.
Mechanisation on farms has obviously transformed the agricultural sector. But the ability to get foodstuff to markets, refrigeration and shipping are all equally important factors.
None of this would be possible without fossil fuels.
Late last year, Arla Foods began a trial of Bovaer in 30 farms across the country. At the time, according to BBC Very Iffy, the company claimed the additive could reduce methane emissions from cows by 30-45%. News of the trial caused consternation among some and led to a boycott of some Arla products. The manufacturer of Bovaer, DSM-Firmenich said these people were the subject of mistruths and misinformation and the product was “totally safe” for use.
Late last year, Arla Foods began a trial of Bovaer in 30 farms across the country. At the time, according to BBC Very Iffy, the company claimed the additive could reduce methane emissions from cows by 30-45%. News of the trial caused consternation among some and led to a boycott of some Arla products. The manufacturer of Bovaer, DSM-Firmenich said these people were the subject of mistruths and misinformation and the product was “totally safe” for use.
Meanwhile, Bovaer was mandated to use across Denmark in early October this year and there have been many reports that the additive is damaging to livestock, prompting an investigation by the Danish government. By pure coincidence, Arla announced in early November it had stopped the British trial and was evaluating the results.
How did we get into this position of endemic bovine stupidity? Let’s dig in.
Net Zero Emissions
At root, this whole controversy is a story about Net Zero. The climate alarmists are concerned that methane concentrations in the atmosphere measured in parts per billion are having a devastating effect on the climate. This prompted organisations like UK FIRES to call for beef and lamb consumption to fall by 50% by 2030 and be eliminated altogether by 2050.
In its Seventh Carbon Budget the Climate Change Committee (CCC) was less draconian, calling for a 25% reduction in overall meat consumption by 2040 and 35% by 2050 compared to 2019 levels. Within this, it expects a steeper 40% reduction in red meat by 2050. CB7 also calls for a 27% reduction in the number of cattle and sheep by 2040 and a 38% reduction by 2050. It calls for these reductions even while noting that methane emissions “are already 62% lower than they were in 1990”.
Carbon Cycle
The alarmist narrative is driven by a misunderstanding of the carbon cycle. Cows and other ruminants have roamed the earth for thousands of years. For instance, there were about 60 million bison in North America in the 18th century, compared to about 87 million cattle in the US at the beginning of 2024. Somehow these bison did not manage to cause runaway global warming.
Cows eat grass and methane released from cow belches and rotting manure is released into the atmosphere. The methane oxidises to CO2 quite quickly and then is reabsorbed by grass through photosynthesis. The grass grows and stores the carbon in its leaves and root systems. The cows then eat the grass and the cycle begins again.
Although methane is emitted during the cycle, it is then reabsorbed, so the net effect on the climate is negligible.
Impact of Methane in the Atmosphere
In addition, the concern about methane in the atmosphere is overblown (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Methane Absorption Frequencies
As can be seen, the absorption frequencies of methane are almost entirely covered by the absorption frequencies of water vapour. The average concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere is about 0.25%, or about 2,500 parts per million. By contrast, methane concentration is about 1,900 parts per billion, or more than three orders of magnitude lower than water vapour. The idea that a change in methane concentration will have an impact on climate when its absorption frequencies are already saturated by water vapour is absurd.
Bovaer Impact on Cows
Now we turn to the impact of Bovaer on livestock. Back in 2024, the Danish Centre for Food and Agriculture produced a paper setting out the impact of Bovaer on methane emissions and milk productivity.
The paper documented five experiments on Danish cow herds. The reporting of the results is not quite consistent, with some focusing just on methane reduction and others also including the impact on Energy Corrected Milk Yield (ECM) (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Impact of Bovaer on Methane Emissions and Energy Corrected Milk Yield
Both Johnson experiments showed reductions in methane emissions of about a third, with corresponding reductions in ECM of a similar magnitude. The Kjeldsen experiment reduced methane emissions by nearly a quarter but was silent on the impact on milk yields. The first Maigaard paper showed an 18-23% reduction in methane emissions and simply recorded an unquantified negative impact on milk yields. The second Maigaard paper showed a reduction of between 31% and 34% in methane yield and zero to 5% reduction in ECM depending upon Bovaer dosage. It is noteworthy that none of the experiments got anywhere near the high-end 45% reduction in methane emissions claimed by DSM-Firmenich.
Another meta-study by Pupoet al. concluded that 3-nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP), the active ingredient of Bovaer, reduced methane emissions by 27.9% but a dairy with 1,000 cows would need to be compensated by $128,320 per year to cover the cost of the additive and loss of milk yield.
We can only wonder at the bovine stupidity that would mandate the introduction of an additive that reduces milk yields almost as much as emissions. To get the same output, we would need more cows and have almost the same total emissions, but of course at much greater cost.
Bovaer Safety Data Sheet
The Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for Bovaer leads to additional concerns. It shows Bovaer causes serious eye damage, skin irritation and is suspected of damaging fertility. If the product gets in the eyes, users are recommended to immediately call a Poison Centre and rinse with water for several minutes.
This calls into question DSM-Firmenich’s claim that Bovaer is “totally safe” to use.
The Danish Experience
The Farmers Guardian has reported health issues in Danish cows being fed with Bovaer. The Danish Government made the feeding of Bovaer in herds of over 50 cows compulsory on October 1st 2025. On these farms, Bovaer must be added to the cow’s ration for at least 80 days a year. Farmers have said that their cows have suffered from issues including fever and diarrhoea, fertility performance has been impacted and in some instances farmers have reported cows have collapsed and died. Maybe the suspicion of fertility issues in the SDS can soon be confirmed as fact.
A farmer described Bovaer as a poison, noting an explosion in digital dermatitis and higher somatic cell counts. Higher somatic cell counts indicate lower milk quality and suggest udder infection. When he stopped adding Bovaer to their feed, cow health showed huge signs of improvement and somatic cell count fell by 20% two days later.
Danish farmer Kent Nielsen took to X with a video complaining that since started feeding his cows with Bovaer on October 1st his cows have suffered from diarrhoea, gut paralysis and milk fever. He also reported losing 3kg of milk per cow. He has since stopped administering Bovaer after consulting a vet.
The fifth farmer Kent Davidsen from Denmark, has now come forward and talks about sick and dead cows, due to the use of Bovaerpoison. He urges other farmers to stop using Bovaer and his vet agrees with him.
Mr Neilsen’s profile on X also documents many instances of what he terms “Bovaerpoison” on other farms, including the death of calves.
Who could have guessed that messing with the digestive processes of cattle would impact their health?
Conclusions
The climate alarmists have made no secret of the fact they want to reduce meat consumption and cull our livestock herds. They have a mistaken belief that methane emissions from cows are damaging the climate, without considering full carbon cycle of ruminant herds.
The mad rush to Net Zero has caused an outbreak of bovine stupidity amongst our ruling classes. They have come up with Bovaer as a dangerous solution that cuts yields as well as emissions to a non-existent problem of cow flatulence. It is hardly surprising that tampering with the digestive processes of cows would harm their health. Some say that the purpose of a system is what it does, so maybe they see the imposition of Bovaer as an easy way to reduce the number of cows on farms. In effect, we must sacrifice the cows to appease the weather gods. We can only hope that Arla does the right thing and decides not to extend the Bovaer trial into the wider farming community.
The construction of vast solar farms to help meet the Government’s green energy targets could lead to a quarter of the UK’s farmland being taken out of production, a study from a cross-party committee said on Monday.
This risks Britain’s food production falling by one-third over the next few decades unless urgent action is taken, said the report from the science and technology in agriculture committee.
George Freeman, who chairs the committee, said: “We need to support farmers to grow more of our food. We’re heading for a situation where we could easily see a very serious food security crisis.”
In the past 25 years, the UK has lost over 1.8 million acres of farmland – a 4.4pc decline – contributing to a 12pc fall in food production.
Fears are now growing that the trend could accelerate as the Government ramps up its solar blitz.
Renewable energy companies are currently paying farmers over £1,000 an acre to allow the construction of solar panels on their land – around ten times as much as a landowner would receive in rent for allowing cattle to be grazed.
Mr Miliband is currently pushing through an 8,000-acre “mega solar farm” in central Norfolk, which is part of Mr Freeman’s constituency.
“To call it a farm is an insult to a proud farming county. We simply cannot afford to lose prime farmland to meet renewable energy targets,” he said.
Across Britain’s patchwork fields, where wheat and barley have fed the nation for centuries, a new harvest looms: solar panels, sprawling over fertile land in the name of Labour’s Net Zero crusade. In Northamptonshire, villagers like those in Earls Barton, Easton Maudit and Bozeat fear the proposed Green Hill Solar Farm will devour 2,965 acres of their farmland, yet their objections, voiced to North Northamptonshire Council, carry no veto.
Across Britain’s patchwork fields, where wheat and barley have fed the nation for centuries, a new harvest looms: solar panels, sprawling over fertile land in the name of Labour’s Net Zero crusade. In Northamptonshire, villagers like those in Earls Barton, Easton Maudit and Bozeat fear the proposed Green Hill Solar Farm will devour 2,965 acres of their farmland, yet their objections, voiced to North Northamptonshire Council, carry no veto. These Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), approved not by local communities but by a Whitehall Secretary of State under the Planning Act 2008, are reshaping rural Britain. How can a Labour Party that champions social justice, equality and inclusive democracy justify paving over arable heartlands without a local vote? The answer reveals a betrayal of Labour’s principles, with the underreported threat to food security, amplified by Britain’s vulnerability to global supply chain shocks, exposing a cost that could leave the nation hungry.
The NSIP framework, established by the Planning Act 2008, fast-tracks projects deemed critical to national interests, from motorways to solar farms generating over 50 megawatts. Developers propose, the Planning Inspectorate examines and the Secretary of State decides, rendering local objections toothless. No referendum, no veto, just a nod from Whitehall. Green Hill, spanning nine sites across Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, exemplifies this, with locals decrying the loss of fields that sustain their communities. This centralised process clashes with Labour’s 2024 manifesto promise of a democracy “inclusive and accessible to everyone”, leaving rural communities, less politically connected than urban centres, to question whether Labour’s “fair society” excludes those who till the soil.
Labour’s technocratic push, seen in Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s approval of three major solar projects in July 2024, prioritises 2035 clean energy targets over local agency. This echoes the party’s historical tendency to favour state-driven goals, a pattern now risking rural alienation. Yet the cost extends beyond democracy to the very sustenance of Britain’s people. The stakes are dire in a world of fragile global supply chains. A 2025 CPRE report reveals that 59% of England’s 38 operational solar farms generating over 30 megawatts are built on productive farmland, with 827 hectares (2,043 acres) of Best and Most Versatile (BMV) land – Grades 1 to 3a, including 45 hectares of “excellent” Grade 1, already lost, an area equivalent to 1,300 football pitches. This translates to roughly 6,456 tonnes of wheat annually, using DEFRA’s 2023 yield of 7.8 tonnes per hectare (3.16 tonnes per acre), grain that could feed thousands, now buried under solar panels. With Britain reliant on imports for 40% of its food, this deepens vulnerability to global shocks, like the ongoing Ukraine war, which spiked wheat prices by 30%, or the 2023 Red Sea shipping disruptions, which delayed 12% of global trade. Developers chase profits on cheap, flat farmland. The public, especially low-income urban households spending 15% of their income on food, faces pricier loaves and the spectre of empty shelves. How does Labour’s vision of equality square with a policy that risks hunger for the poorest, reliant on imports from potentially unstable regions like Eastern Europe or North Africa?
In East Anglia and the East Midlands, Britain’s agricultural heartlands, projects like Green Hill threaten wheat fields that sustain millions, with Earls Barton locals warning of lost harvests. A 2025 University of Sheffield study suggests agrivoltaics, integrating solar panels with farming, could preserve land use. Yet it admits UK trials are lacking, with performance uncertain for wheat, a staple comprising 54% of UK cereal production, unlike maize or beans tested abroad. Rural communities, with median incomes 7% lower than urban ones, face economic and cultural devastation. As their concerns drown in Net Zero zeal, Labour’s policy betrays its pledge to uplift the marginalised.
The defence is pragmatic. NSIPs avoid delays, aligning with national climate goals. But pragmatism doesn’t erase the cost. Labour’s green ambition risks prioritising corporate developers over communities. Alternatives exist: the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s 2024 report identified 250,000 hectares of brownfield or degraded land suitable for renewables, yet fertile fields remain developers’ choice for cost savings. Why doesn’t Labour, so vocal about fairness, demand better?
Scotland’s community-owned wind farms, like those on the Isle of Lewis, show a path forward, boosting local support for renewables by 30%. Labour could champion such models, aligning green goals with democratic values. Instead, the NSIP process sidelines rural Britain, raising a question: can Labour’s Net Zero vision coexist with the equitable society it claims to pursue? As solar farms spread, the stakes – food security, rural livelihoods, national resilience – demand scrutiny. In a world of global supply chain chaos, sacrificing fields for panels could leave Britain not just with barren lands but with empty plates and broken trust.
Achieving Net Zero in 25 years would need a “complete transformation” of the UK’s agricultural and food system that would in effect mean a diet devoid of beef, lamb and all dairy products, according to the latest work from the Government-funded UK FIRES. Look at the research that governing elites commission and read, not what they say. UK FIRES takes an absolute view of Net Zero and bases its work on existing technologies, not the pie in the sky inventions still to come and the whacky schemes that cannot reach economic scale.
Achieving Net Zero in 25 years would need a “complete transformation” of the UK’s agricultural and food system that would in effect mean a diet devoid of beef, lamb and all dairy products, according to the latest work from the Government-funded UK FIRES. Look at the research that governing elites commission and read, not what they say. UK FIRES takes an absolute view of Net Zero and bases its work on existing technologies, not the pie in the sky inventions still to come and the whacky schemes that cannot reach economic scale. UK FIRES is an influential body since it takes a rare honest approach to Net Zero. Among the horrors outlined in its latest report is a future reliance on highly-processed food – industrial test-tube sludge in other words. Using labs to produce just 0.4% of the projected demand for meat in 2030 would involve a capacity “20 times that of the current pharmaceutical industry”, observe the authors.
The need to collapse the existing agro-food system is said to present opportunities for the creation of “hybrid” food products. Animal fat, presumably from non-belching beasts, can be processed to give “definitive flavour and mouth feel of meat” and these can be combined with plant-based ingredients. Alternative proteins (not detailed, but there is much support elsewhere for fly larvae and mealworm flour) might be used in highly processed foods. In future, notes UK FIRES, processed plants might include ingredients from precision fermentation or cultivated fats. These are all held together by half of the chemistry lab including stabilisers, colourings, E numbers and preservatives – though UK FIRES inexplicably fails to give the detail on this. And not forgetting masses of salt and sugar, a common staple of so-called healthy processed foods designed to give them a semblance of pleasant taste.
Utterly disgusting – readers might prefer to lay in stocks of the dog’s kibble as a healthier and more appetising alternative.
The land currently occupied by productive and generational farmers would see “radical shifts”. The required changes to achieve absolute Net Zero emissions from food systems “would present many opportunities”, argues UK FIRES. There would be competition for “environmental services” and this presumably would include such “opportunities” as nature-destroying wind turbines and solar dead zone parks. Rewilding and carbon capture or sequestration are mentioned. Planning and support for land use “transformation” is said to be needed, and it is said to carry the promise of “large social and environmental benefits”. At this point, it might be observed what a grand start the current anti-farmer Labour Government has made by slapping a recent 20% death tax on small family farms that are passed onto the next generation, or not as the case may now be. That should help clear a bit of space for the new enclosing aristocracy, the subsidy-hunting windmill rentiers.
UK FIRES is funded by a £5 million Government grant and its team of academics is led by Professor Julian Allwood, Professor of Engineering and the Environment at Cambridge University. In the past, its absolutist work forecast a world where Britain would lose 75% of its energy, where flying and shipping along with beef, lamb and dairy would be banned, while bricks, concrete and glass would almost cease to exist. These are all reasonable forecasts if hydrocarbons are suddenly removed from a modern industrial mix. But the academics’ brutal appraisals scare the horses at a time when the British Prime Minister is telling porkies that Net Zero will not affect people’s lifestyles.
The message has probably gone out to tone it down a bit on the banning front, so the latest report on agricultural and food supply is more nuanced. So it is more that we can transform food supply, it will all be a great adventure and economic opportunities will be created everywhere – that sort of guff, straight out of the Ed Miliband songbook. Slashing farmland acreage but boosting pharma-food is supposedly meant to reassure, although such reassurance is unlikely to survive when confronted with reality.
However as we have seen, the authors behind UK FIRES are Net Zero absolutists and the message is still that all greenhouses gases must be removed from agriculture. UK FIRES says this is a complete transformation, which is one way of describing a societal and economic disaster in the making. Artificial fertilisers which use hydrocarbons to add nitrogen to the soil have massively boosted crop yields around the world over the last few decades. Without their use, food supplies would halve, leading to mass starvation and death. With restrictions on the use of imported goods that have connections to hydrocarbons, Britons would gradually starve to death in their millions. Net Zero fanatics, which sadly include many British legislators, somehow draw other conclusions, the better we assume to sustain their virtuous egos.
Meanwhile they are unlikely to be interested in the science around nitrous oxide, the gas produced by the fertiliser. It has warming properties, which in common with other greenhouse gases tend to ‘saturate’ at certain levels, a natural process in the infra-red spectrum that has helped regulate the Earth’s climate over the last 600 million years. A recent paper from four distinguished scientists noted that the atmospheric concentration of N2O was only 0.34 parts per million (ppm) and it was growing at just 0.00085 ppm a year. The entire global food supply is being put at risk for warming identified by the scientists at 0.064°C per century.
Interestingly, the press release accompanying the UK FIRE report highlights the complete elimination of greenhouse gases from British agriculture by 2050, but the actual work fails to address a world without artificial fertiliser. This is somewhat surprising given the vast increases in plant vegetation that will be needed for the new food labs. A number of gas-eliminating technologies are mentioned but it is admitted that they are not currently feasible, while more precision fertiliser application is noted. As if this latter action has not already occurred to commercial farmers. The UK FIRES of old would have made a no-nonsense banning statement, but it seems the current authors, like most other Net Zero cranks, simply ignore the issue. There is of course a good reason for doing this since there are no solutions, except human hunger.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.
I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.
In the article, I showed how the inheritance tax on farmers wasn’t really intended to raise much money to cover the supposed £22 billion black hole in the public finances which Starmer and Reeves apparently discovered about five minutes after Labour had been elected, forcing Labour to raise the taxes which five minutes earlier Labour had promised not to raise.
In the article, I explained how investment company Aberdeen (also known as the capital-letter-free, vowel-free ‘abrdn’) had launched its FLAG (Forestry, Land and Agriculture) strategy to spend hundreds of millions of pounds buying up forests and farmland. But Aberdeen had been frustrated in its attempts to buy agricultural land due to much of the land being owned by family farmers. So Aberdeen paid for a report on Britain’s tax system by Left-wing think tank Demos. Surprise surprise, one of the key recommendations of the Aberdeen-sponsored Demos report was to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Given that many farmers are ‘asset rich but cash poor’, this would have forced many farms to sell off land to pay the inheritance tax, thus allowing what Aberdeen called “purely financial owners” like Aberdeen to buy up the land. To help push through this policy, Aberdeen managed to get its head honcho onto a taskforce of business leaders invited in October 2023 to advise Rachel Reeves on what she should be doing when Labour inevitably won the July 2024 General Election.
I had imagined that the media geniuses at the NFU could pick up the story, get a few great quotes from outraged farmers – in particular Jeremy Clarkson – and launch a blitzkrieg on Reeves leading to widespread public fury and to her having to cancel the tax and possibly even resign.
I don’t consider myself anyone special. But, as I have had more than 10 current affairs books published covering such topics as politics, economics, charities, the psychology of selling, universities and non-existent anthropogenic climate change, the least I expected from the NFU media heroes was an acknowledgement of my email to them and of the story. But there has been nothing, zilch, no answer apart from two automated email responses informing me that the person I had contacted was on annual leave. The NFU gets an (astonishing to me) £36 million a year, or thereabouts, mostly from farmers. About £26 million of this goes on NFU staff costs. So I started to wonder whose interests the NFU actually serves – those of farmers, who pay almost £36 million a year to the NFU, or those of NFU employees whose lifestyles are supported by the apparent generosity of Britain’s farmers.
There are many wonderful theories about organisational behaviour. One very simplistic one I have developed is that in any non-commercial organisation – healthcare, charities, government departments, regulators, local councils etc – there are two main types of person:
the servers – those who see their role as providing whatever services that organisation is set up to provide
the self-servers – those who see the organisation as a way to advance their own careers, increasing their own importance, power and financial well-being
Given that the first group, the servers, will spend much of their time and effort delivering the service which the organisation should be delivering, this often means that the second group, the self-servers, the group using the organisation to advance its own interests, inevitably accrues power and influence. And the more power and influence the self-servers manage to appropriate, the less likely it is that the organisation will actually do what it was originally set up to do.
Here’s a nice picture of the NFU HQ:
It looks like quite a relaxing place to work. Though there aren’t many cars outside. Perhaps many of the 817 hard-working NFU employees are hard-working from home?
Working from home can be, I realise, quite challenging. By the time you’ve got the kids to school, walked the dogs, read a few emails, browsed some of your favourite websites, had lunch, walked the dogs again, answered a few emails, browsed a few more of your favourite websites, picked up the kids from school and taken them to their various after-school activities – well, there’s not much time left to do the job you’re paid to do. Of course, I have no idea if many or even any NFU staff do actually work from home. But I do know that any serious, professional organisation which understood its original purpose would have acknowledged my email, read the article on the Daily Sceptic website and sent me some form of reply. So my question for Britain’s farmers is: do you really think you’re getting good value for the almost £36 million you fork out to the NFU each year? Or is it time to do a Trump-Musk – admit the NFU is not fit for purpose and that it’s just a self-serving bureaucracy like so many other organisations in Britain today – civil service departments, police, charities, border control, NHS, regulators and so on – scrap the NFU, fire all its employees and start again building a new organisation costing you considerably less money and staffed by people who are genuinely interested in service rather than self-service? Then perhaps we could extend the Trump-Musk treatment to so many other useless, costly, ineffective British bureaucracies?
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
You must be logged in to post a comment.