General / Off-Topic Flooding...

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
There was an article on the Today program about this, and the roots of it are in WWII. I've not Godwinned the thread, I promise. Quite understandably the government of the time tried to turn as much land as possible to agriculture, which involved draining land, and keeping it well drained; rice aside crops like fast-draining soil. A study in Scotland (I think) noted that by blocking upland drainage the fields became unusable, but the rate of water arriving into rivers and flooding those in lower areas dropped. So block off the drainage channels. It’s a start, but won’t solve the problem. In many ways we’ve been lucky that we’ve not really had a winter. Had all this rain fallen on frozen ground it would be much, much worse, and nothing would have helped.
Agricultural funding is, pretty much, done to suit the French, and the rest of us just follow in their wake. Much of it makes no sense, I get about £100 a year from not farming one of our paddocks, which is mad, and at that scale not really worth the time and effort to fill all the forms in. This letter sums it up well. In a former life I helped looking at some EU farming grants. At the time Italian olive growers were claiming for more square-metres of olive groves than Italy actually had square meters of landmass. The whole thing is corrupt, riddled with fraud, and requires an overhaul.

The problem with the Guardian article is that people want, actually require, cheap food. To make food cheap we cannot de-mechanise, and do all the other things the article wants. The yield would drop, prices would rise, therefore to keep price stability subsidies would rise, subsidies come from taxes, so taxes must rise. The G also hates the idea of GM crops for no evidence-based reason, so we can't use those either.

There is a more fundamental problem, to make organic farming work nothing can leave the farm without the roughly same amount of organic matter coming back. It sounds weird, but here’s how it works. We grow grass. That feeds a cow, which is very good at turning it into milk, meat, and a calf. Oh, and manure. We put the manure on the crops. Which we eat. All of these things take AWAY from the land, the only bit we’re putting back is the manure. It’s illegal for us to put our own faeces back on the land (with good reason) so whatever we eat is “lost”. If we sell things, that’s “lost”. To make up the organic matter I have to import it; we do so with muck from the riding school down the road, grass cuttings, leaf mould (which is acidic, great for blueberries but not much else) etc, but it’s barely enough. That’s a smallholder, where organic farming works due to the small scale, but scale it up to a proper farm and where will all this organic matter come from?
Our land is swamped. Today’s rain cannot be soaked up, it’s just sitting on the surface and pouring into our stream. I’m only a smallholder, but I met one of the commercial farmers this morning when walking the dog. He’d never seen it this bad on his land, and he felt there was nothing he could have done to help either his fields or the good people downhill from us.
The soil is sandy here, really good for most crops, but I can’t dig it at the moment, it’s too wet and heavy. Which is annoying as I have asparagus to plant.
I don’t have an answer. I’m a tiny cog in a big machine, and other than my one fallow hay-field get nothing from the EU.
Oh, and a small wager – by next summer there will be a hosepipe ban in East Anglia…
 

Jenner

I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Geeze, Yaffs.... I was all happy this morning and now you've depressed the heck out of me! THANKS! :p
 
Actually Anglian Water are pretty good, the last dry spell they didn't have a hosepipe ban when other water companies in traditionally 'wetter' regions did.

Part of the problem is that there hasn't been enough investment in flood defences for many years. The Environment Agency has long had a policy of 'managed retreat' which seems to owe more to accountancy than hydrology. Locally we were very close to having flooding. due to the tidal surge back in December, luckily the defences held with the peak tide coming within a couple of inches of overtopping one of the floodgates. A few weeks later the Environment Agency announced that they were due to replace that floodgate with another one of EXACTLY the same size.
 
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