I've got a call here for Thomas Malthus ...

[fivemack]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115773,00.html

has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".

As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.

England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Indeed, whenever I eat a biscuit or thicken a gravy I feel I ought to give thanks to the wheat-farmers from roughly Edmonton across to roughly Winnepeg and down to roughly St Louis, whose vast unpopulated expanses produce flour enough for all practical and very many impractical purposes.

Actually, looking up various bits of statistics, it is more likely to the French that I should give thanks; they produce forty million tons of wheat a year, 90% as high yield as the UK and on 2.5 times the area.

But the issue is that people are demanding produce grown organically in England, for food-miles reasons, and don't seem to be very clear on the fact that England's not actually big enough (one fifth the size of Saskatchewan, and much less exclusively planted with wheat) for this to be possible.

Looking up Canadian wheat-growing gets me

http://www.esquesinghistoricalsociety.ca/DL1853-1.html

which would be startlingly useful were it 1916; I suspect Toronto township is no longer 50% better than the average place in Canada to grow wheat. Agricultural statistics seem unusually hard to google ( http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/field/Wheat/europe/europe.htm is the best I managed), it may be that what I need is a farmer's almanac.

[aldabra]

You can get some agricultural statistics here: http://www.defra.gov.uk/esg/work_htm/publications/cs/farmstats_web/2_SURVEY_DATA_SEARCH/survey_data_search_overview.htm
if what you're interested in is hectares of turnips per ward.