From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
The former head of Britain’s farming union yesterday spoke out against large-scale solar farms, declaring ‘there’s a huge amount not to like’.
But Minette Batters warned they will continue to be built while her members faced uncertainty about the future of dairy and arable farming – and while wealthy investors are free to buy up large chunks of the countryside.
Ms Batters, the ex-president of the National Farmers’ Union, also highlighted ‘horrific examples’ where tenant farmers are being booted off land for huge solar schemes so the landowner can make more money.
She said such changes of land use will continue while investors including overseas financiers and private equity firms are able to buy up huge chunks of the rural landscape unchecked, warning: ‘The country is up for sale’.
Ms Batters called for the next government to prioritise a new land strategy, so protections are given to traditional farming and its economic value is properly-acknowledged.
Ms Batters warned that solar farms will continue to be built while her members faced uncertainty about the future of dairy and arable farming (pictured: A proposed 1,400-acre site for a solar farm in Chickerell, Dorset)
She added: ‘We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change.’
She said she could understand opposition to solar farms – but also had sympathy for farmers cashing in on such projects because they provide a guaranteed, index-linked income for decades.
‘You can understand at the moment, from a farmer’s perspective… £1,200 a hectare (per year), index-linked, locked in for 20 years, what’s not to like?’ she said.
‘For everybody else, there’s a huge amount not to like. This is the trouble with a solar farm. There will be one beneficiary.’
But Ms Batters said that in some cases, farmers themselves have been forced to leave their farms to make way for solar farms if they are tenants of larger landowners.
She said: ‘We are seeing horrific examples of some land owners taking land back from tenants to put into solar.’
Ms Batters criticised how land ownership by wealthy investors including private equity firms is being allowed to proliferate – and called for action.
Citing the debt-fuelled private equity takeover of supermarket chain Morrisons, which the Daily Mail campaigned against, she said: ‘We saw what happened with Morrisons. We might not have a British-owned supermarket in 10 years.
‘Now, private equity has moved into land. The country is up for sale.
‘I remember having a conversation with (former Chancellor) Kwasi Kwarteng. He said, you can’t be a free market one day and not the next.
‘We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change.’
Ms Batters called for the next government to prioritise a new land strategy, so protections are given to traditional farming and its economic value is properly-acknowledged.
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The question remains, would it be more CO2 efficient to simply burn the coal used to build these things ourselves?
The answer is no. Our emissions become Chinese etc emissions and thus our emissions go down.
Creative accounting is all the rage.
I see, so the climate over the UK will improve- but China’s will not. Now it all makes sense. 🙂
The climate in the UK can only improve….
But weren’t solar panels supposed to COEXIST with farm land? This would indicate otherwise.
Depends on the crop and type of solar installation.
If you deploy as much solar as possible, there’s just corners and edges left for other uses. Maybe you can graze some sheep.
If you use vertical solar panels, they produce less power, but leave more land for other uses. Some crops can be fit between the rows of solar.
They produce less solar power than “normal” panels? In England, which is so well suited for solar power collection.
No worries. Farmers just need to farm at night when the solar panels aren’t working. Simple.
Solar panels block solar energy that could be used for photosynthesis.
They can NEVER co-exist with nature and plant growth.
Sure, and when it improves, English will be able to play hockey on frozen Thames.
No, It will make absolutely zero difference to temperatures.
Will destroy and denude the land they are installed on, though.
Eventually , all that will grow is weeds.
Point of Order.
The China’s Climate doesn’t matter.
Also I’m pretty sure that the propaganda doesn’t care about UK climate either, its about some foreign island having taller waves, and some penguin eggs not hatching,
Can you prove that?
It’s a claim that still seems to be in dispute.
Ledgers today are so one sided.
Your puns are a credit to ya’.
Well, promised wind turbine construction went not to Scottish yards….
“SCOTTISH Labour has called on the Scottish Government to “stand up” for
domestic jobs following the decision that the multi-billion-pound Seagreen
offshore wind farm is to be manufactured abroad and built with foreign
labour. A spokesman parroted the usual platitudes on how the Scottish
Government was committed to supporting growth within the Scottish supply
chain. The SNP has controlled Scotland’s devolved legislature since 2007 so
has had adequate time to ensure that Scotland’s companies and workforce
benefited from the wind turbine tsunami. Instead the turbines were
manufactured in China, Denmark, Germany and Spain and erected with foreign
labour.”
https://scotlandagainstspin.org/2020/10/turbine-failure-under-snps-watch-herald-letters/
Er, global, not local.
Perhaps the Scottish bird-slicer-makers offered slightly fewer – or smaller – kick-backs, compared with those ‘nasty foreigners’ …
It wouldn’t – it couldn’t – be that the Scottish makers had to pay Scottish prices for power, and labour, and regulatory compliance.
So, obviously, the nature of the kick-backs was at fault.
And I thought that the SNP was a party of the people.
Just not the right people in this instance, it appears – to a disinterested outside observer.
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Emission outsourcing
Offshoring, even. But off our books just the same.
So if Victoria generates electricity for SA using Coal, it isn’t Victoria’s emissions as the generation was for SA, and it isn’t SA emissions as they didn’t generate them in the first place. Sounds like Net Zero could be as simple creative bookkeeping
Open borders is what we’ve got. And that isn’t going to change, despite the rhetoric.
“the next government to prioritise a new land strategy”
You won’t find that in the Conservative manifesto.
https://www.conservatives.com/content/conservatives/gb/en/our-plan.html
Labour wants to set up (and swich on!!!!) GB Energy. That involves land use change quite a bit…
“Pioneer floating offshore wind, by fast-tracking at least 5 GW of capacity.
More than double our onshore wind capacity to 35 GW.
More than triple solar power to 50 GW.
Quadruple offshore wind with an ambition of 55 GW by 2030.”
https://labour.org.uk/missions/clean-energy/
Bottom line: as long as the entire political system remains wedded to insane net zero ideas and policies, the farmers have more than got their work cut out.
Campaign update…
Yesterday the agenda wasn’t about jobs, health, immigration, net zero or anything else people might care about. The agenda was entirely dominated by Kinky Starker’s attempted purge of the Labour far left. As one wag put it: How can Starmer stand up to Vladimir Putin if he cannot stand up to Diane Abbott? A very good question.
I’ve tried asking the Lab and Con candidates in my constituency [in Sarf Lunnon] about ‘Battery Backup’ for the wonderful Nut Zero world of 2030 or 2035 [respectively].
Answer came there none.
Not even tumbleweed blowing lazily past.
Some roneo’ed words that do not acknowledge that wind and solar can possibly not cover all our needs!
That scares me – that there appears to be absolutely no concept that if the wind doesn’t blow at night, the country blacks out.
No lighting or heating, no hospitals, no computers, no Air Defence Radars, no traffic lights – no power for EVs.
And – it seems – no care for the consequences.
If Sunak is trying to lose this election – and it rather looks so at times – it might be a very good election to lose.
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Google search on “average latitude of UK” turns up:
The United Kingdom (UK) spans latitudes ranging
from 49°N to 61°N, … The UK’s average latitude
is approximately 55°22’41″N.
further search says:
Based on an EnergySage analysis of a Department
of Energy database, a typical heat pump in a
typical home uses 5,475 kilowatt hours (kWh)
per year—easily the single biggest energy-user
in most houses.
Yeah, let’s close the coal mines, ban natural gas
and claim solar is the way to go. Christmas morns
in the UK are going to be quite chilly in the future.
Might wanna try building yurts in the UK. I hear they’re nicely insulated. They work well in cold, windy Mongolia. 🙂
Joseph,
Thanks, but I imagine the planning [‘zoning’] requirements in the UK will preclude yurts, except in Liberal Democrat-held constituencies.
Although you would then need to know the Planning Committee Chairman, and – possibly – leave Him/Her/Zer/Xey/Shtooum [Lib-Dem] a haunch of freshly-butchered mammoth! From your cave to theirs ….
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Steve,
Yes, all the UK is North of Winnipeg in Canada.
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We have seen this before. What was it called? Hmmm, on the tip of my tongue, oh, yea, Holodomor. Leftards love starving people to death.
good solution for obesity 🙂
Climate Change Solution induced famine
Well, if people can’t afford food, they buy less of it, so it should follow that with less demand we won’t need nearly as much food.
That is how it works, right? </sarcasm>
According to Stalin it is, and he was right about everything! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Thereby freeing up ,more farmland.
Sounds like a new Pfizer medicine.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
In the United States we still have hope that our future will be changed for the better by electing Trump and other Republicans.
I don’t see any hope for the UK or Europe. They have no clear-seeing leaders like Trump. Instead, they are all caught up in the CO2-is-dangerous Mass Delusion which causes them to make very bad decisions for their respective nations.
CO2-phobia really is a Mass Delusion. There’s no evidence to support it.
Leaders?
In the UK we do have Dodo ‘Ed’ Davey – a Leading children’s entertainer. I assume that is his profession, at least, judging by the recent ‘campaign’ photo-ops: –
I believe he offers reasonable rates for the under-8s.
I don’t know any over-10s who would want to be sen with him …
e
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There was no evidence for existence of Christ and his second advent, but this has not prevented the powers that were from creating a religion to bring masses into submission.
Trump is better than Biden, but sadly, neither Trump, nor any single individual can be a savior of our future.
Trump in particular lacks integrity, consistency, does not have a clear coherent vision on many subjects including CO2 and climate, is not aligned with his own party agenda, has not built a team of people better than he is in various subject matters.
Trump is here today, not here tomorrow… In his first term he demonstrated that he is unable to achieve results that last past his presence. I doubt this idea even crossed his mind. He seems to always live in the present moment, like those folks who chirp on Twitter.
What are you talking about? Donald Trump’s lasting legacy was the same as all other presidents during the last 100 years.
He signed all legislation to spend more than was collected in taxes.
If it was the same, than it hardly matters who the president was. A president by any other name would
stink as baddo just fine.On a more serious note, the goal of a US president is not to spend within amount collected in taxes, but to maintain the role of dollar as the world main currency. If the latter is true, the world will keep paying for the US deficit through export of inflation.
In many ways, I agree. But neither Tom Abbott nor anyone else on this thread called Trump a savior and nobody claimed he was our only hope, contrary to what you implied.
Much of what Trump did was through executive orders and policies that were reversed on Day One of the Biden regime.
Trump failed to build coalitions with leaders in the legislature. When the democrats took over the House, they had zero interest in working with Trump. Trump also spent too much time arguing with the press instead of trying to build relationships.
I’m hoping he’s learned something during the last 4 years.
Trump’s lasting legacy is his court appointments.
Trump was not horrible comparatively. He did some good things, but more intuitively than systematically.
He did very little to make whatever he has was doing lasting permanent changes. He was not willing to go to the core of the issues, even though he had this ability with all of immunity his position provided. If anything he does can be reversed by the next one, what is value of this?
Hoping is fine, but nothing suggests to me he would be different second time around.
And when I hear he said at a fundraiser he would bomb Moscow and Beijing… He is a big mouth, a impulsive chatterbox, a narcissistic populist, and can be as dangerous as any of them.
“Trump also spent too much time arguing with the press instead of trying to build relationships.”
The way I see it, the press spent too much time arguing with (attacking) Trump.
The Leftwing press goes on the attack against Trump, and then Trump gets blamed for being the divisive one.
People see what they want to see. Sometimes what they see is not really there. Especially when the Leftwing Media is actively distorting reality 24 hours a day.
“People see what they want to see.”
Yes, and this includes Trump and Republicans being the savior from CAGW fraud.
If they do not even articulate their position on the issue during the election, why would one expect them to do it?
And it’s only the beginning. For the UK to arrive at net zero nirvana, being a small nation with a lot of people, I’d think MUCH of the landscape will have to be covered with solar panels.
Which still won’t work as advertised
Building solar panel farms is the McGuffin, its the foreign purchase of large sections of arable domestic land is the Operation.
Its smarter to pay-off some locals to strip their neighbors of their land and keep them off and to have the international community nod in approval vs a foreign militarily invading the country, taking it by force and leaving an occupying force to protect it.
It’s a bit late for Minette Batters to realise that solar farms are a bad at producing food. As leader of the National Farmers Union, she was all for decarbonising agriculture.
Here in Alberta, farmers are falling all over themselves to be chosen for solar panel sites. The only ones upset are the neighbors whose land wasn’t chosen to be bought or leased for premium bucks…they get stuck making a livin’ the old hard way, now with ugliness to look at over the fence….Windmills stir a little more opposition…noisy, block the view, and eventually the smell of rotting dead ducks gets to you…some of the power gets used by bitcoin mining operations that have sprung up…so the thermodynamic, financial, and scenery abominations abound.
A few month’s back the provincial government called a moratorium on more renewable energy projects in order to get answers to their question “why do these folks get gov’t money ?”
I know personally I feel rewarded knowing that my tax dollars are helping save the environment every time I drive past a mile of solar panels. Do I need a sarc?
More booting required for onshore wind too-
Shell’s move to axe offshore wind plans a ‘red flag’ for other projects (msn.com)
We have to get to net-zero food to save us from the dooming.
Interestingly there was Section 48 Planning Act notification of ‘One Earth Solar Farm’ in yesterday’s Grauniad. Yet another such ‘farm’ in the Fens.
“This solar farm will occupy 1500 hectares of land within the administrative boundaries of Newark and Sherwood District Council, Bassetlaw DC, West Lindsay DC, Lincolnshire County Council, and Nottinghamshire CC”
Pure speculation of course, but I wonder if this is a reason Peta of Newark has not commented recently – more immediately pressing things to worry about.
The solar farm will have a total capacity exceeding 50MW
If the owners sold voluntarily, what is wrong with that?
The headline says farmers are being booted from their land. According to the text of the article, they are selling the land. No coercion is listed.
Does anyone know how wealthy investors became wealthy?
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from joining those unions that always blame wealth for their members problems.
The only people who have ever benefited from unions, are those who run them.
Wrong! It’s not their land if they are tenant farmers.
Exactly. Here in southwest Georgia, energy companies bolstered by massive government subsidies and tax breaks are offering landowners triple the amount of money per acre to lease land for solar for 20 years compared to what a farmer can afford to pay to grow crops. This is some of the best irrigated land in the US.
The UK has never been a free market, even less so in modern times. You can’t paint your own door a different colour or busk in a tube station without someone’s official stamp of approval. We are unfortunately a nation where the Vogons have taken over. I’m not sure, between the USA and the UK, which nation has it worse.
I could have sworn that a number of our trolls have been proclaiming that solar power and agriculture can co-exist with no problems.