French solar solution a lesson for sleepwalking Tories

Sir, – With reference to the article “solar projects prompt fears for farmland” (November 25) and the letter “don’t sacrifice our food security to solar profiteering” (November 21) which both raise perfectly legitimate concerns about loss of prime agricultural land to solar farms, there may be a solution.

In Britain, everything is usually done at minimal initial cost with the often unfortunate future consequence of higher costs and other problems, which in the case of British solar farms means that the panels are installed very close to ground level, stopping the soil being used for crop production.

However, as reported on the Euronews website on October 22, in France things are rather different.

Solar panels are being installed at a greater height allowing farmers to drive tractors, combine harvesters and other agricultural machinery underneath the panels, allowing crop production to continue. The particular French solar farm referenced in the article is in the Haute-saône region of north-east France, and is part of a trial to see if this kind of energy generation is possible while still allowing large-scale crop production.

However, trials of this kind are so widespread across France that the French have come up with a new word – agrivoltaics – meaning the practice of using land for both solar energy production and agriculture.

There is a suggestion that the solar panels may protect crops from some of the worst excesses of climate change, such as the extreme heat that hit large parts of France last summer.

But solar farms are not the only threat to British agriculture, as mentioned by former Defra secretary George Eustice (Anger over admission on Australia trade deal, November 19) who is quoted as saying that the deal with Australia is “not actually a very good deal”. That is a remark that should set alarm bells ringing, because if the Australian deal becomes a template for those with other big food-exporting countries, we may see a repeat of what happened to British agriculture in the late-1800s and early1900s.

At that time, Britain imported huge amounts of cheap food – mostly from what was at the time referred to as the Empire and Dominions.

Many British farmers simply could not compete on cost and walked away from their farms. Farm buildings were left to decay and collapse, and farmland slowly returned to its natural wild state.

Some of this land was brought back into production during the First World War, when imported food supplies were threatened, but most was not brought back into production until the Women’s Land Army was reformed in June 1939 when Britain’s food imports looked to be threatened again by war.

Odd how Britain and British governments seem to sleepwalk into problems until it is brought sharply into focus by war – in the case of food production in 1914 and again in 1939 by what became world wars.

In the case of oil supplies it happened in 1956 with Britain’s disastrous involvement in the Suez Crisis, and then again in 1974 after an oil embargo triggered by the Yom Kippur War, and now we have an energy crisis caused by war in Ukraine.

I still have my father’s petrol coupons issued by the British Government in 1956, and my own petrol coupons issued in 1974. They are of an identical design.

I have a deep suspicion the British Government has a huge warehouse somewhere, stacked to the roof with petrol coupons, probably next to several other warehouses stacked to the roof with useless substandard but extremely expensive PPE.