When is the time to confront the elephant in the room ?

delilah

Member
Modern life is rubbish isn't it. 1880 refrigeration allowed lamb to be shipped by Steam ship from New Zealand that wasn't very green either. I will keep growing until people say they don't want it. i'm not going to deny moving food around uses energy but in a global economy it feeds a lot of people literally and figuratively.

Just made a cuppa. As MLK said, by the time we have eaten breakfast we have relied on half the world. And I think it was a union leader over your way who said that there is only one thing worse than being exploited by western imperialists...
We have to find ways to make the food chain work for everyone and for the planet, and with the will we can do it. One thing is for sure, there are 101 things we should be doing before we start to worry about what HP tractor is tedding the hay.
 

DaveGrohl

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Cumbria
Just maybe all this links to population, fueled primarily by greed.
Greed to repopulate at a greater rate then the planet will take. Greed to get get richer, buy bigger to do more, to get more back, to get bigger still...
If you couldn't afford 6 kids and the system didn't help you, then you just might think twice?
In some ways we are just kidding ourselves concentrating on reducing carbon footprint, which must of course be a step in the right direction, but until the greed aspect is changed then surely nothing really changes 🤔 we just get a bit further down the path before the inevitable.
When we've wrecked the planet (after our time), no-one can breath naturally, stand the heat, or probably the cold also, nothing grows (other than cancer & covid 19...), Will we still be trying to work around the white elephant that is population, caused by greed.

Probably not..., we will be off again doing the same on planet Mars.
And it's said by some that animals are thick!... Time for a wake up call before it's too late.

Sorry for the gloom, the fergy 35 wouldn't start... 🚜
I've been saying this for ages, the collective IQ of the human race is heading downhill rapidly. Our leaders seem to be listening to people with lower intelligence levels than themselves.
 

Humble Village Farmer

Member
BASE UK Member
Location
Essex
Sorry, I'm tired, harvesting untilled old fashioned grass that'll be stored 300-400 yards from where it's grown, and fed back on the same fields, either directly, or via some fym.

Right.
someone asked
'Genuine question though
Some of the big dairies carting grass or maize 30 miles with 15+ trailers on the job
How does that stack up firstly and what carbon cost ? '

Carbon wise, that system would have to be several times heavier on the carbon than what I was doing today..... hauling vegetation 30 miles in the UK- unless there are particular circs- to feed to cows is just insane.
I've particular reason to move a lot of fodder and/or cows (vast areas of summer pasture, but stuff all mowing) and the raw maths don't look very clever when you take them apart.
(it's far better to move one wagon load of cows to the fodder than 10 wagons of fodder to the cows)

Carbon wise? A pointless waste.
Not forgetting the environmental impact of growing maize in the first place.
 

Bald Rick

Moderator
Livestock Farmer
Location
Anglesey
Nope , fat and sugar are responsible or that in the western World, people are addicted to it.

IIRC, it is corn syrup that corrupted America & made them in to blubber.
And of course, where USA goes we follow

Personally, I would be quite happy gnawing at a slab of cold beef fat slathered in dollops of horseradish sauce.
 

herman

Member
Mixed Farmer
Are we forgetting the main reason that farmers exist ?
We are producing food to feed people, and I mean actual food not food to feed a digester or even for horses etc.
I'm not saying that we should be exempt from carbon emissions but going on a plane for a holiday is not a necessary thing to do, don't know how much planes produce but its probably similar to food production.
I feel no gilt filling my tank on the tractor producing potatoes that some are directly sold to customers to eat or selling grain to pig, poultry and dairy farms.
I could moan about the lorry that collected grain yesterday using diesel, but it was off to Ashbourne for feeding to poultry to feed people.
Eventually the whole emissions problem will be solved by hopefully people with a lot more brain power than me.
By the way I'm not knocking digesters or air travel, and we make a lot of hay and haylage for horses.
 

grainboy

Member
Location
Bedfordshire
No disrespect to Lowland1 , as he is only producing to demand,
But, having lived and worked all my life in and around Bedfordshire, especially the Veg growing area of the A1 corridor,
We used to provide mainly the London and local area with veg, especially Brassicas, I personally when contract spraying, covered thousands of acres of Sprouts,
Now however, I couldn’t even take you to a field of Brassicas,
Why, ?
Financial, Supermarkets demand, local demand, labour,
Local Bedfordshire Growers is now only a transition depot for imported goods, no doubt the share holders take a financial gain from this crazy situation.
We did produce for relative local consumption, to solve the environmental problems but no more,
 

egbert

Member
Livestock Farmer
A lot of animal feed has "rainforest products" in it like palm kernel, soya and to a lesser extent, maize. So it might not be human edible but it might actually have a more negative impact than ordinary barley or beans for protein grown locally.
I did some checking for piece backalong, and Mole Valleys cake had no soya in it, and if it did, it'd be the 'waste' product after oil extraction.
 

Bury the Trash

Member
Mixed Farmer
IIRC, it is corn syrup that corrupted America & made them in to blubber.
And of course, where USA goes we follow

Personally, I would be quite happy gnawing at a slab of cold beef fat slathered in dollops of horseradish sauce.
yes yummy with out the addictive or pot belly :sneaky:bit ,better fer yer teeth as well.
 
Our action to negate or slow global warming is clearly not going fast enough. I don't point the finger at the UK exclusively, we are far from the worst offenders, however in general, are we doing enough ?

Looking at Agriculture alone, currently social media is full of pictures of tractors, mowers, tedders, choppers, trailers, balers etc, etc as we take advantage of this glorious weather, and literally make hay/silage while the sun shines, in general great to see, as we all know what a struggle it is sometimes when mother nature plays games.

Then you see a wonderful new 150+hp tractor tedding, which of course begs the question about the viability and economics of such a misfit between power and power consumption.

Then look at the total hp/ton of hay or silage made, and looking deeper into the fuel/energy required per ton and ask the question, what is the average ?

A SP forage harvester weighs in at about 12.5 tons, so the engine has to lug that, as well as power the whole unit, similar to a combine. We then have multiple tractors and trailers, a loader / buckrake & tractor, this is after mowing, tedding, rowing etc.

So, once the sheet is on, or the grain store closed and the job completed, does anyone have a benchmark for how many galls of diesel/fuel per ton has been consumed, and what the CO2 emissions for silaging, hay making, or harvesting is ?

It is only a matter of time until fingers start to point, and these questions are asked, and without a benchmark, how do we improve our performance ?

With the price of tractors nobody can afford to run the right size for every single job. It’s greener to run 1 tractor doing everything on a 1000ac farm than it was 40 years ago when the same 1000ac farm would probably have at least 6 tractors.
 
It’s more that they are greedy gits who eat far more than they need to.


We are in a time, where, for the first time in history, the poor can literally afford to eat themselves to death. Go back throughout the ages and only the very wealthiest people were fat.

I do believe food production and distribution today is a model marvel, the housewife can buy a lot more food (a far smaller portion of her disposable income) but with a heck of a lot more calories on board. I seem to remember that people are paying less in real terms for a weekly shop than they did for the same food in 1940. And to be honest, when you see how cheap basic foodstuffs are, it is pretty impressive.

It might not be carbon friendly but I can eat salad, potatoes, vegetables and fruit of all kinds virtually all year around. You can't argue that isn't good for people's health.
 

Bury the Trash

Member
Mixed Farmer
With the price of tractors nobody can afford to run the right size for every single job. It’s greener to run 1 tractor doing everything on a 1000ac farm than it was 40 years ago when the same 1000ac farm would probably have at least 6 tractors.
if the extra cost was down to extra drivers well, the future will be 6 autonomous ones ,lighter weight as well and down controlled traffic avenues.
Got three tractors on the go with one driver here atm, tedder,rake ,and baler . saves hitching and unhitching :cool:
 

Lowland1

Member
Mixed Farmer
We are in a time, where, for the first time in history, the poor can literally afford to eat themselves to death. Go back throughout the ages and only the very wealthiest people were fat.

I do believe food production and distribution today is a model marvel, the housewife can buy a lot more food (a far smaller portion of her disposable income) but with a heck of a lot more calories on board. I seem to remember that people are paying less in real terms for a weekly shop than they did for the same food in 1940. And to be honest, when you see how cheap basic foodstuffs are, it is pretty impressive.

It might not be carbon friendly but I can eat salad, potatoes, vegetables and fruit of all kinds virtually all year around. You can't argue that isn't good for people's health.
Growing up the ‘70s i’d never seen a mango let alone eaten one. Rice and pasta were exotic foreign foods. Peoples tastes have changed. As you say you can eat salad everyday if you want unfortunately people would rather eat burgers and have their five a day deep fried.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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