How can food be in the same climate risk as air travel?

After a mainly dry but foggy week we are back to warmer but wet weather for the foreseeable future once again. How much rain is hard to predict but the fields are still green and whilst the leaves have now all long gone apart from the oak which have some on their branches, it does not look like winter. Ten days from Christmas and it’s still pretty mild.

Carbon-free fertiliser we are told will be available as early as 2024 which will make a huge difference to arable farmers. We are constantly told how high emissions from agriculture are, and apparently 25-31 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from wheat and potatoes is caused by the production of fertilisers according to Yara, one of our main fertiliser manufacturers.

Yara we are told has already halved the greenhouse gas emissions from fertiliser production by implementing nitrous oxide catalyst abatement, substantially reducing gas emissions from nitric acid plants. However, ‘green’ fertiliser is produced from hydrogen sourced from water; unlocked by electrolysis powered by renewable energy; is converted together with atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia.

This process uses the traditional Haber Bosch process which is the main industrial process for the production of ammonia; invented in the early part of the 1900s and revolutionised agricultural production. Science once again shows how we can find solutions, the only problem with this green fertiliser is that it costs between two and five times more than conventional fertiliser.

I suspect the costs will come down in time, but as is true of everything ‘green’, it is more expensive. Will the customer pay or, more importantly, will they be given the choice? This extra cost would be pretty minimal in a loaf of bread, but we know how reluctant supermarkets are to put up the price of any staple part of our diet.

John Price, a farmer in Herefordshire, has been hard at work clearing the River Lugg at the edge of his farm to prevent flooding. He has formed the banks and claims the river had not been dredged for decades and that he was acting with the support of his parish council and the Environment Agency who told him he was in breach of his responsibilities as a ‘riparian landowner’ to prevent further erosion of the river banks.

Owners of homes flooded in February as Storm

Denis struck have thanked John Price for not just clearing the river and re-establishing the banks, but at his own cost clearing the third arch of a bridge upstream which was the cause of flooding, resulting in homes being in up to four feet of water. The parish council also thanked him for clearing the third arch and removing Himalayan Balsam, one of the most invasive weeds in this country.

However, he is now in big trouble as three government agencies are investigating following a media outcry fuelled by environmental groups who say he has ‘destroyed’ the river banks. Police attended the scene! Natural England has served a legal notice, the Forestry Commission has issued a notice to stop any tree felling work and the Environment Agency is also on his back. I will follow this case with interest as it appears on the face of it to be complete madness.

The ridiculous Climate Change Committee report has put red meat consumption and dairy in the same category as air travel and gas boilers as the highest global emitters of CO2. The report urges the public to make low-carbon choices about their transport, energy use, purchases and diets, including a reduction of red meat of 25 per cent by 2035 without asking where it comes from or how it is produced.

Who are these people? How does a report like this help the average person in the street make the right choice? All sectors are transitioning towards net zero, agriculture included, and we are aiming to do it at no cost to the consumer whereas the Government’s gas boiler policy is going to be very expensive for all of us.

Who in their right mind mixes food with travel and heating? It is completely ludicrous – and having encouraged wood burners for years now they are the worst things in the world!

The Government encouraged diesel engines and then realised its mistake of focusing on carbon alone and have moved against them when car makers had followed their advice.

We don’t need the EU to pass crazy regulations and post nonsense reports; we are very good at it ourselves. We shall see how much less regulation and interference there will be in our lives. We are already claiming our standards will be even higher than the EU, yet we are nervous of putting that to the test in negotiation.

Brexit negotiations still on a knife edge a week later and as the knife edge (or the knife) is being extended, one questions how long one can remain on a knife edge? It cannot be a sharp knife and I suspect that it is grandstanding on a spoon that is in fact taking place on both sides.

Readers have asked me to try to be positive about a no- deal Brexit or, more accurately, leaving the EU on WTO terms (not Australian as it has been described as), and tell them of the positives for farming. That is very difficult to do as the position is overwhelmingly a disaster for farming.

I can think of one small but real positive result of Brexit (deal or no deal), one which put the Government to the test. All food in our schools, hospitals, prisons and armed services should come from British farms. This is something which should happen in any case but successive governments of all colours have refused to do this.

One would think that good quality food of the highest standard would be fed to the young, the frail, the unfortunate and our heroes, but no, it is all about cost and the cheapest tender gets the green light every time. Having made the sacrifice of Brexit (deal or no deal) in order to regain our sovereignty as a country, surely we should then make sure that British food is served in our public sectors?

The Grocer Magazine headlines reads ‘Brinkmanship threatens self-induced food shortages’, no not the Prime Minister and his team of negotiators, but supermarkets and wholesale suppliers arguing over who will bear the additional custom costs and potential tariffs which will arise next year.

Suppliers claim that they cannot possibly absorb such costs on their thin margins and insist that such costs must be passed on to shoppers and if this is not resolved, order will start being refused at the end of this month.

No doubt this will be treated as any extra cost in the supply chain and it will be sorted, but it is suspected that retailers are waiting to discover if the Government’s duty deferment scheme would also apply to non-UK suppliers before progressing talks with suppliers.

To end on a positive, supermarket prices have fallen back into deflation for the first time in over a year and prices were down on average 0.08 per cent last month after increasing 0.02 per cent in October.

This is the largest monthly deflationary level since December 2017.