Water
In 2010 an international survey was completed for UK Water Industry Research and the Global Water Research Consortium on energy efficiency in the water industry. In pulling together different approaches to energy use for water and wastewater it amplified the Water / Energy Nexus world-wide, which helped to focus parts of the UK industry. This came on top of major EU-driven industry changes to reduce chemicals in potable water and pollution in effluent.
Concern for the fragility of our environment in Australia, Europe and elsewhere, along with changing climate, has shown the links between ecology, land use, farming, forestry and water supplies. Some UK water companies have been active in research to foster synergies between environmental management of upland ecology and secure water supplies and the English Environment Agency (EA) has encouraged river basin management. However, there has been no planning or assessment of the growth of housing deemed necessary and its impact on upstream(water supplies) or downstream(effluent) catchments. A recent workshop debate in London seemed to conclude that environmental impact of housing proposals on green belt was inevitable. It should be noted that the EA is a Government advisory body with responsibilities but little authority in planning activities so its response to policies to ‘build houses at all costs’ will be muted.
Land use
There have been continuing reports since 2000 from a variety of places, e.g. Southern California, the US and Canadian prairies, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and China, that agricultural land is being lost to deserts and the quality of the remainder is decreasing. In the UK, the EA points out that soil degradation is significant in some parts of England, notably East Anglia, one of our most productive agricultural areas.
In the US prairies they have apparently enjoyed a relatively wet period over the last century but the weather is now returning to normal and they cannot dig wells any deeper. The wheat, that only has about 100 days between the last and first frosts, won’t grow as its roots penetrate less than 30cm so it is totally dependent on irrigation. The native prairie grass takes three years to put down at least 2m of root before it risks throwing up a seed-head, but that won’t feed us or beef cattle, only the bison will survive.
In Africa, the United Nations University of Agriculture in Accra, Ghana, reports that soil degradation across the continent is such that Africa will be lucky to feed 25% of its existing population by 2025, and Nigeria has one of the fastest growing populations in the world.
Should we in the affluent UK worry? Our history of the Irish potato famine and Scottish Highland Clearances shows that we have not been adept at managing such crises. We have little remaining influence in Africa as the “white farmer” has all but disappeared and most corporate farms are Chinese owned. So check the supermarket shelves for the origins of most of our green vegetables – essential to our good health – drought susceptible Africa from the Cape up the east coast to Egypt.
In the UK the loss of fertile farm land cannot be compensated by clearing jungle but particularly in the tropics this very action is causing more than climate change by reducing carbon sinks and the land’s ability to hold and store water. Soil run-off in storms results in wasted future farmland as well as being a major cause of floods.
Solutions
Some areas are managing to buck the trend. There are projects to grow forests in deserts based on modern knowledge of the sciences of water, minerals and agriculture. Glasshouses for salad crops are central to the system and shrub and vegetable crops are parallel outputs, but these are only pilot scale at present.
Reports from Burkina Faso some years back, where in one part of the country the top man said ‘Keep the trees’, revealed that most crops in the tropics grow better under tree cover and the root structure provides deeper, drought-resilient soil. This is mirrored in Australia, where a seven year drought has changed attitudes, particularly to rivers. In their practice of Permaculture crops are grown in layers from root crops up through vegetables, shrubs and fruit trees all under sheltering canopy trees. A worthwhile engineering challenge may be adapting this success to mechanized production.
Technology has certainly been applied in Holland. Channel Island greenhouses used to compete with the Dutch for tomatoes but things have changed in the last forty years. Spanish field-grown tomatoes average 4kg/m2 after the first season but current yields from 9Ha Dutch greenhouses are 80kg/m2, and they are sustainable. Robot picking of soft fruit is difficult, but potatoes can be scanned for quality at 24 per second.
A grape warehouse in Kent handles rotational seasonal imports from twenty countries for year-round supplies to most of the UK supermarket chains. Dutch research enables them to store the fruit under controlled conditions to allow shipping rather than air freight.
Risks - fertilizers
A recent farming and food conference in Wales highlighted the disconnect between nature and the economics of present day intensive corporate farming. Even allowing for the organizers being the Soil Association, it was evident that balances are being disturbed under the pressures of trying to make a living. We have yet to realize that humans are a part of nature and we won’t survive apart from it.
Farmers are under huge pressure to buy fertilizers and pesticides with little in the way of direct environmental advice. There was even a feeling that some farmers in Wales voted against the EU referendum partly because most of their Single Farm Payment subsidy goes towards buying chemicals. Organic farming seems better for our environment but the gains in productivity from fertilizers, between 1.7 to 5 times depending on who you ask, put our ability to feed ourselves organically in doubt. However, even if we keep on down the chemical route it seems to make sense to keep the soil structurally sound. There may be opportunities for returning more farm waste and sewage sludge to agricultural land in ways that do not cause foaming in streams and rivers. We should definitely persist against burning stubble or other waste; our land doesn’t need a thin layer of ash to be washed into streams by the first shower. There is a healthy debate between traditional ploughing and “no-till” mulching methods but either way the land needs organic materials added in order to increase its ability to hold water and nutrients, to foster root growth and minimize erosion. It needs depth and structure as protection against the certainty of more extreme weather.
A further risk is that not all the fertilizer is taken up by plants – efficiency is not nature’s business. We have been sweetening UK soils with lime for centuries and some old kilns survive, notably at Brockham in Surrey. Then those glorious clipper ships from the 1800s onwards that brought home tea, spices and wool actually earned their crusts bringing potash from Chile. Since the oil age we have dosed our land with even more agro-chemicals. Scientists are now warning of a “nitrate time bomb” in our rocks, but that is only what has permeated through our soils and not been washed into our rivers and coastal waters. The waste materials are not returned in empty ships, they are our soils’ and rivers’ legacies.
Risks - the global market
The global food market fosters unsustainable aspirations. We demand 365 day supply choices from seasonal products but there are risks outside our control. Crop failures in virtual monopoly countries or locations will raise prices and cause shortages. The global market is dominated by only ten supermarket retailers so they dictate terms. Smart farmers are forming cooperatives to sell direct to retailers to maximize their profits, but this results in further vertical integration. Meanwhile, about a third of global agricultural workers are paid virtually nothing. Some countries cannot grow enough food for their own needs and a lot is lost due to failures in governance and corruption. The UK’s wealth may assure our supplies in the short term but demand from India and China is growing and they will soon be wealthier than us.
Food poverty is an emotive issue and has parallels with energy poverty in economic terms.
The poverty of agricultural workers is noted above and subsistence farmers are being forced off the land and losing their water rights. Even in the UK real income has been static for ten years and probably won’t change in the next ten, so real consumer choice is very limited. Fifty years ago we used to spend 30-40% of our income on food, now it’s 14-16%. This reduction hurts the farmers not the retailers and this average distorts the reality at the low-income end of the market.
Conclusions – Is the system broke and how do we fix it?
A harsh summary would be that out of the 7.5 billion people on Earth, about 1 billion are under-nourished, about 2 billion are over nourished and about 2 billion have “hidden hunger”, i.e. they are not getting the right balance of nutrients for healthy living. So 5 out of 7.5 says we need a radical re-think. Costs could easily be met by reducing the 30% of food wasted as suggested in a previous IMechE report. We are paying the price of cheap food systems; we need the right nutrition, ethically sourced, or the system won’t sustainably feed 10 billion people.
Most of the market (consumers) has lost touch with the primary producers( farmers), which is similar to people losing touch with nature. We are part of, not apart from nature: if we don’t look after it then it won’t look after us. Technology will help but there is another facet of human nature: as citizens we want to be sustainable, but as consumers we don’t want to pay for it.
We in the UK with our scientific expertise should be able to asses this complex balance objectively and come up with an authoritative conclusion to inform Government policy-making on UK farming, environment, water and food.
A parallel need is to perform an in-depth risk assessment of the global food growing prospects and to see where we come in the pecking order. Otherwise we remain prey to scare stories that may be just that. The Dutch v Channel Islands lesson is clear: if we don’t compete we lose control.
For Africa and for us 2025 is only two Governments away; unless we investigate we won’t know until it’s too late.