gryffron wrote:There’s a bit less food. But the sheep also cut the grass and keep weeds from growing up and onto the panels. In areas which are difficult for machines and staff to access. So they are a double benefit.
I suspect you don't realise quite how much less food we're talking about. Good arable land can produce 7000kg of usable wheat flour per hectare, a hectare of rough upland might support 1 sheep yielding 20kg of usable meat. Even if the good land can support a couple of sheep, you're still looking at maybe 50x as much usable food per hectare from keeping it as wheat.
These debates can appear from the outside like simple NIMBYism, but really it's a more strategic argument about keeping the best farmland under the plough. Most people don't realise just how rare good farmland is - it's something like 6% of England that's classified as Grade 1, and a lot of that is concentrated in a small strip of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, with odd bits in Norfolk, North Kent etc - real Tory heartlands, and it's no coincidence that this debate flared under Liz Truss, a Norfolk MP. I'm sure that on the rubber chicken (rubber turkey in Norfolk?) circuit she was bombarded by farmers who think it's a big strategic mistake to take the "best and most versatile" (BMV) land out of production. In theory any non-agricultural development that takes out more than 20 hectares of BMV land has to be referred to Natural England, but there's a feeling among rural Tories that system doesn't work particularly well. Of course, Truss ignored the real problem and concluded that if BMV appeals helped NIMBYs, then redefining BMV to include even "moderate" land would mean more appeals and make L. Truss more popular among rural NIMBYs.
This is a CPRE overview of BMV planning issues, obviously they're more worried about housebuilding, but page 24 in particular is notable - almost as much BMV land was lost to development in 2022 as in the previous decade, this is a sharply increasing problem.
https://www.cpre.org.uk/wp-content/uplo ... curity.pdf