The Countess of the estate where Downton Abbey is filmed has criticised the Government’s rewilding policies, saying people “cannot eat trees”.
Lady Carnarvon, the 8th Countess of Carnarvon and chatelaine of Highclere Castle, near Newbury in Berkshire, said it was wrong to blame farm animals for contributing towards climate change and the focus should be on other factors harming the environment.
Writing for The Telegraph, she said that while rewilding schemes play a part in the countryside, the focus should be on growing more food in the UK and becoming less reliant on imports.
Can’t understand it at all. Landowner says we should adopt policies which made land worth more.
So regardless of what happens, Lady Carnarvon needs someone to cut her a cheque?
Maybe the French were right about cutting the heads off their aristocracy in 1789.
She happens to be correct. The cow farts cause climate catastrophe is risible bollocks. Likewise, she is correct that we should be more self sufficient and people cannot eat trees. Whether her ideas affect land prices is neither here nor there.
Allowing land to be more productive sounds like a good thing for us humans.
Are you sure the people who keep reducing our capacity to feed ourselves don’t want you dead? Cutting off food supplies has never been a friendly act.
I have to be a bit contrarian on this.
As long as there are no U Boats in the Atlantic, I do not really care where our food comes from ( except Holland and Spain, where it is tasteless ).
As long as trees are “proper” dessi- decidi- … oaks and ashes and elms, then it adds to the beauty of the ciuntryside.
“As long as there are no U Boats in the Atlantic, I do not really care where our food comes from ( except Holland and Spain, where it is tasteless ).”
Except covid taught us that when the SHTF foreign governments will literally stop ships or lorries heading for the UK with supplies of whatever is the crucial supply of the day. The idea that we can rely on ‘the rule of law’ to secure supplies of food in a crisis is complete bollocks on stilts. If food is short, and the UK can’t supply itself from its own producers, then you are reliant on foreign governments to allow their producers to export it to you. And if the choice is between feeding their own population or exporting food to us, then guess what, export bans will be in place faster than you can say President Macron (it was he who stopped lorries heading for the UK with PPE in the early days of the covid debacle).
” Landowner says we should adopt policies which made land worth more.”
Landowner says we should adopt policies in the best interests of the UK public, who need to eat food, not trees or flowers.
In fact any landowner refusing to get involved in rewilding is doing themselves a disservice. The amount of money being thrown as these schemes is obscene, you could make out like a bandit if you avail yourself of them. I worked out I could make about £500k over 3 years if I put my whole farm into one of these schemes. Everything would be covered in weeds for sure, and not an ounce of food would be produced but I’d be laughing all the way to the bank. And it wouldn’t even affect the capital value of the farm, because I could plough it all back up after the 3 year scheme is finished, and go back to food production. But I’ve decided not to join any of the rewilding schemes, because they are just wrong.
As long as there are no U Boats in the Atlantic, I do not really care where our food comes from ( except Holland and Spain, where it is tasteless ).
You will when the EU + London gimps announce your red meat ration is being reduced again and there are tasty insects on the menu instead.
Jim – Yarp, Ireland, Holland and other CW countries are also destroying their farming sectors.
Assuming that we’ll always be able to buy food from overseas is a heroic assumption. We can’t even keep the Suez canal open for business.
Huh? Am I missing something here? Surely, if Lady Carnarvon is arguing for less rewilding = more land available for farming = lower land prices/rents, then she is arguing against her own self-interest, not for it? Doesn’t more of something make it cheaper? What am I missing here?
llater,
llamas
She’s arguing for fewer imports – which raises the value of domestic farming land.
The killer of the grand aristocratic fortunes in the 19 th century was free trade in food. They were nearly all invested in arable land, steamship from the US/Argentina etc, then trains opened up Ukraine. Food prices, and so rents on land, plummetted. It was such a big effect that you can see it in the usual Piketty/Saez/Zuycman wealth estimates.
Landowner says we should adopt policies which made land worth more
Surely you don’t think there are NO bundles of taxpayers’ bunce paid to farmers for allowing nettles, thistles, brambles, docks and ragwort to adorn the countryside? Yummy money and no work.
What’s the betting that there will ultimately be special grants to unwind the “rewilding” nonsense and to bring land into productive use.
@ Tim Worstall – yes, she’s arguing for reduced imports, but also for increasing the supply of domestic agricultural land. Are we sure that the one outweighs the other, and that therefore land prices/rents will necessarily rise? I’m not sure that today’s conditions are necessarily directly comparable to the existential changes of the 19th century that you mention. After all, there is now close-to-the-100% free trade in food worldwide that caused the collapses in land values you describe, it’s not like that can happen again, or that minor reductions in food imports will necessarily have massive impacts on land prices.
I think it’s only fair to consider both sides of what she said before making assertions about the impact on her own self-interest.
But maybe I’m mistaken.
llater,
llamas
llamas: But maybe I’m mistaken
You’re being too polite. Any reduction in imports will be due to the local stuff being competetive since she’s not talking about protecting domestic produce. Also the increase in domestic production will be trivial in relation to domestic consumption. Finally, “rewilding” provides landowners with an income for doing nothing so arguably land values will fall if farm owners actually have to farm rather than just file online returns.
Of course it’d make sense if rewilding actually achieved anything.
However.
The quantity of vegetation any piece of ground will support will always tend towards the maximum. That’s how nature works.
Plants are mostly cellulose.
All vegetation will eventually get eaten by something. That’s how nature works.
The digestive route to breaking down cellulose requires intestinal bacteria that produce methane as a by-product. All animals use much the same bacteria. They’re much the same bacteria as the bacteria in the soil break down cellulose without animal assistance. They all produce methane as a by-product.
So any piece of land will result in the same quantity of methane emissions, whatever it’s used for.
Following from the above comment, here’s a thought:
Vegetation on any piece of land will maximise to the extent of the resources available.
One of those resources is water.
Farming in the UK does not generally require irrigation. It gets sufficient natural rainfall.
Farming in countries like Spain requires extensive irrigation. Without it, here would be a semi-desert.
So by opting to to import food from Spain rather than growing it UK side. you’re actually increasing the total of global methane emissions. If you weren’t buying it we wouldn’t be growing it. Little would be growing here.
I’ve just had a skim through the rewilding criteria. The minimum plot size is 40 hectares, that does rather tilt it towards one end of the land-owning spectrum.
I could never picture a hectare until somebody mentioned that as it’s 100m x 100m, it’s essentially a 400m running track – 100m on each side, close enough. So, 40 running tracks to qualify for taxpayer money. That’s 10% of a small commuter town!
If you take a significant amount of agricultural land out of production that reduces supply. Lower supply = higher price. So the Lady is not being a hypocrite.
Farms are expensive and the return on farmland would be nugatory without subsidy. This is true pretty much all over developed countries. So it’s the subsidies that support the price.
CH4 emissions from cow farts can be reduced by feeding them seaweed, I’m told. However, more CH4 is produced as land is artificially fertilised. While it’s a powerful greenhouse gas it’s pretty short lived in the atmosphere so I wonder if I should be getting my knickers in a twist about it.
Photosynthesis is pretty cool but it’s slow. It’s possible that some boffins can come up with a genetic modification and an alternative chemical pathway to produce greens directly from CH4.
In short, I don’t know, and I suspect that anyone claiming to know is talking his own book.
According to imagery from NASA satellites, an area the size of the continental USA has been rewilded since the year 2000, particularly around deserts – which are now shrinking – and other dry areas.
This, NASA scientists say, is due to an increase of air CO2 concentration from 380ppm in the 1970s/80s to 420ppm now.
The climate change lunatics want to reduce air CO2 concentration to pre-industrial levels, 280ppm.
This will destroy all that recent rewilding and all increased vegetation that has grown since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Makes no sense.
Llamas: Doesn’t more of something make it cheaper? What am I missing here?
Volume. 1 000 items with each one shilling profit, earns more than 500 items with each one and sixpence profit.
This is why supermarkets can out-price small shops, the former have high volume so can survive low profit margins; the latter have low volumes so need higher margins.
Lower prices increase demand.
With respect to farmland, it takes only marginally more resources to farm a larger area and obtain a bigger harvest. Rewilded land = weeds and pests… not a happy juxtaposition for crops.
On the subject of rewilding, well partial rewilding, this is amazing and something to support. There’s some good comments explaining why it can’t be used everywhere but its a good start,:
This abandoned mine site went from a barren wasteland to a verdant ecosystem teeming with soil and plant life within a year.
How? The intelligent use of cattle.
Mine tailings are the rocky waste materials left over from processing metal ores. Without elaborate and expensive reclamation efforts, mine tailings can remain bare and lifeless for decades. The typical reclamation process is expensive, requires heavy machinery, grueling manual labor, and often results in lackluster revegetation.
Enrique Guerrero, a cattle rancher from Chihuahua, MX, decided to take a different approach in hopes of restoring the lifeless mine tailings to a functional ecosystem.
After some terracing and seeding, Enrique began ultra-high density grazing on the mine site. He eventually reached a density of 2,500 cattle per hectare, rotating them through the site in quick intervals.
In less than a year, the entire site was carpeted with perennial grasses and forbs, with a total of 44 species. The forage attracted deer, wild turkeys, mountain lions, numerous birds, and dung beetles.
Standard reclamation efforts cost at least $10,000 per hectare and require trucking in massive amounts of compost, fertilizers and amendments. Despite these efforts, the results are frequently underwhelming, with a mere 40% survival rate for seeded plants considered a success.
Enrique’s approach cost $6,000 per hectare, and required only cattle, seed, corn stalks, hay, and supplementary feed. The result was rapid regeneration of the site’s topsoil and complete revegetation of what would otherwise be a defunct moonscape.
While using cattle for land regeneration is not universally applicable, it opens the door for innovative solutions in managing the nearly 40,000 abandoned mine sites in the US alone.
https://x.com/samdknowlton/status/1710291338103595475?s=20
@Jim – “I worked out I could make about £500k over 3 years if I put my whole farm into one of these schemes. ” … “I could plough it all back up after the 3 year scheme is finished, and go back to food production.”
Take the money! If enough farmers switch to rewilding, we’ll see if it really can be successful. And if you can easily switch back, then if we find it’s not viable the harm is minimised. What would be really bad would be farmers rewilding and then retiring, emigrating, or otherwise becoming permanently unavailable.
Arguing for fewer imports might be one way of looking at it. Less reliance on them, therefore greater self-sufficiency might be another.
The missing point about carbon emissions from livestock is that all the carbon they emit must first have been captured from the atmosphere by the vegetable material they consume (unless they’re being fed on coal). It’s the carbon cycle that we all learnt about in secondary school, except for those on Skolstrejk för Klimatet that day.
As BiS pointed out, if all farm animals vanished overnight, vegetation would still grow, die and be consumed by fungi and bacteria in very similar processes to those taking place inside ruminants.
@Chris Miller – “all the carbon they emit must first have been captured from the atmosphere”
True, but not the full accusation. Livestock emit methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so the presence of livestock increases emissions of carbon equivalent. And, of course, the most important factor to take into account is that very many campaigners care only about emissions caused by human activity.
@Charles
There’s some truth in that. But the ‘Green ‘ propaganda takes all the CO2 (equivalent) emissions and then compares that to emissions from transport or energy production, which is completely (but not accidentally, I suspect) misleading. If there’s any difference (in terms of CO2 equivalent) between cows eating crops and leaving them to rot in the fields, it must be very much second order.
And, since farmers are far from daft, animals are only grazed on land that isn’t suitable for arable – arable being (a) significantly more profitable and (b) nobody has to get up at zero dark 30 to milk a field of wheat.