National Farmers Union funding legal challenges to curbs on river pollution | Farming

2 comments
  1. Modern horticulture on the industrial scale we believe is necessary can’t exist in the UK without the mass use of nitrates, pesticides and herbicides.

    Unfortunate there is no way to keep these out of our rivers on the scale they are currently used. It’s not even a case of farmers not wanting to take even less profit from their produce or supermarkets demanding they sell for infeasibly lower costs.

    Our land is fucked having been intensively farmed for decades and we need those chemicals to keep producing at the rate we do for a few more years. If we are going to continue to produce what little we do grow here, we have to accept that ecologically we are going to wreck everything beyond where we are now.

    Sure pure organic and indoor controlled farming solutions provide an answer but it’s no where near economically viable to do so at the moment due to the massive costs involved.

    The government could introduce schemes and funding that would allow dedicated single produce farms to produce at scale (ie give farmers 4 or 5 specialist machines and storage for each crop when they previously had one and accept they would remain idle most of the time) but I don’t see the government, or any government for that matter investing that far into the future.

    The only thing we can do is grow less, import more at vastly added cost and transfer the whole problem to other parts of the world – which is I personally don’t think is much of a solution.

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