Milk prices

[colin]

Ecology and soils are everything...

If you care about the environment and soil health then you're right but the modern food economy doesn't reward that. The value given to natural fertility in times past was irrevocably changed by artificial fertilisers. pesticides, globalisation, mechanisation, and a perverted economic system of subsidy and taxes.

RC

Yes of course soils and ecology are still key to the profitability of farming, crops today are grown on chalk soils of the downs but they require high inputs to compensate for the lack of nutrients as chalk downs are not much more than chalk and flint, those inputs cost money so such land can never be farmed as profitably as naturally fertile soils as one finds in East Anglia.

[ReformedCharacter]

Ecology and soils are everything...

If you care about the environment and soil health then you're right but the modern food economy doesn't reward that. The value given to natural fertility in times past was irrevocably changed by artificial fertilisers. pesticides, globalisation, mechanisation, and a perverted economic system of subsidy and taxes.

RC

Yes of course soils and ecology are still key to the profitability of farming, crops today are grown on chalk soils of the downs but they require high inputs to compensate for the lack of nutrients as chalk downs are not much more than chalk and flint, those inputs cost money so such land can never be farmed as profitably as naturally fertile soils as one finds in East Anglia.

I think you'll find that set-aside payments reward good and poor land equally. And poor land gains the same IHT benefits as good land. Then of course over the last few decades (amongst others):

Quotas
Guaranteed Thresholds
Managed Agricultural Production and Prices
Compensatory Payments
Target Prices
Intervention Prices
Projected Reference Prices
Safety-net Interventions

All have the effect of distorting farming economics. The CAP - for example - has encouraged farmers to grow crops and raise animals that without subsidy would not be economic and discouraged farmers from producing crops for which their land is naturally suited. So, ecology and soils are clearly not everything.

RC

[colin]

When I write that soils and ecology are key to the profitability of farming it is in the context of discussion of whether food production alone can be profitable without subsidies, your point is true but to me at least it is too obvious to mention.