Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Farmers a big part of cleaning up national act
MPs have this week been debating Britain’s progress in reducing carbon emissions. Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells the successor to recently resigned Farming Minister George Eustice that he was impressed by what he heard
TO whom it may concern, I thought Thursday’s debate on getting our carbon emissions down as close as dammit to zero was an excellent one, and there seemed to be a general a feeling we are all moving as one in the same direction – which makes a refreshing change these days.
I was particularly interested by what the NFU had to say on the matter because when you stand back and look at the wider picture, agriculture has the potential to be one of the major influences if we are to clean up the national act.
Of course farmers are already doing their bit in helping to decarbonise other parts of the UK economy by installing or hosting renewable energy projects, and supplying bioenergy feedstocks.
And there should be many opportunities coming up to expand both activities, even to a point where anaerobic digestion biomethane plants could provide a replacement for fossil fuel in the gas network. In fact what with their solar and wind installations you could say farmers are already showing the rest of the country the way and we should be encouraging them to shift up into sixth gear and get on with it.
But then we run up against the problem of planning consents and adverse public opinion. You only have to mention a wind turbine or a solar panel to some people for them to run round shrieking about the countryside being despoiled and turned into an industrial wasteland.
I remember a case years back when a farmer in North Devon wanted to install an early model of an anaerobic digester. It was a sound idea: he would be accepting animal waste from a number of surrounding dairy farms – waste which the Environment Agency was getting increasingly twitchy about when it was simply spread on the land – and turning it into electricity to feed into the grid.
What better deal could there be? He would be making the maximum use of an underutilised product, the area would smell better and the methane would be captured and burned rather than contributing to climate change. You would have thought local people would have been queuing up to shake his hand.
Not a bit of it. They queued up to launch petitions and lodge objections and did their level best to strangle the project at birth. It was the kind of response you might have expected had he announced plans to start processing spent uranium while running vivisection experiments on the side.
Another thing gets me – whenever a farmer puts up plans for a solar or wind installation he is immediately accused of trying to make a profit. What else is he in business for? Is he a charity? If the food market won’t pay him enough to live off what he grows or raises why shouldn’t he venture into the renewable sector?
People who shout loudest about such schemes are those who believe passionately (and rightly) in renewable, sustainable energy generation but don’t want to see the necessary infrastructure. They are the successors to those who in the 19th century were clamouring for more rapid transport but didn’t want to see railways built.
Well I’m sorry, if you put solar panels and wind turbines underground they don’t tend to work all that well.
From my point of view, solar farms and turbines are now as much accepted features of the landscape as electricity pylons. Turbines can actually provide a dramatic and aesthetically exciting dimension to the countryside, as a drive across the North Devon link road from Tiverton to Barnstaple will demonstrate.
Farmers are ready to take up the challenge to drive our carbon emissions down and we should be doing everything we can to help them: fasttrack planning consents, grants, and a presumption against planning inquiries which in so many cases merely provide vexatious witnesses with an unmerited platform but a wonderful opportunity to cause delays and rack up the costs of everything.