I’ve been playing detective today. Having put my bees to bed for the winter, I am not quite so busy, and the electric van was charged up and ready to go, and there were huge trailers of chopped maize flying around the roads. I thought I’d see what was going on, so I followed an empty trailer and tractor pulling out from a farm a few miles up the road. I set off after it, noting full wagons coming in the opposite direction every now and then, the drivers raising laconic fingers to each other as they passed. There must have been a fleet of maybe twenty of them, racing between the farm and the maize fields.
The tractor I followed, like all the others, turned out getting the chopped maize from a farm an astonishing 27 miles away, a round trip of 54 miles per load. You might think that this would be prohibitively expensive, though you might not be aware that farmers and farming contractors pay about half what we do for their diesel.
A while ago similar huge tractors and trailers were roaring through town, also carrying chopped maize. Many people may have thought that this was a normal harvest sight, something as wholesome as Mrs Tittlemouse storing cherry stones and hazel nuts against the winter. Food being stored for all those cosy cows in the byre over winter, like the cows that kneel in their stalls in the Christmas stories. You would be wrong, of course.
In town the maize was going to a massive anaerobic digester, producing ‘biogas’, which the operator built to three times the capacity stated in the planning application, and got away with. (‘Hereford Rules’, we call that).This is from end to end very good business for the farmers. They get a subsidy per hectare on all their farmland. Growers selling maize to the digesters are also getting this subsidy. The tractors travelling large distances use half-price red diesel. And the Renewable Heat Incentive payments mean they get guaranteed generous payments for the gas they produce. An industry, pretending to be a farming practice, subsidised like no other.
This good business for farmers is very bad business for the rest of us. We pay for the subsidies and for the biogas generated, and we get comprehensively greenwashed in the process. The gas produced, which is not really a renewable fuel, is mixed with fossil gas to give that some green credibility. I wouldn’t mind paying towards a green revolution, but this is just greenwashing, or hogwash, or bullshit.
Biogas is better than fossil gas in the sense that it is short-cycle carbon. That is, you burn bio-gas, produced from carbon fixed by photosynthesis in plants this summer, you release the carbon dioxide in the process, and then the maize captures the carbon dioxide again the following summer and you repeat the process. Not as bad as burning fossil fuels.
That would be fine and dandy if the feedstock for the digesters was genuine farm waste. But maize grown to feed digesters is grown with all the usual fossil fuel inputs – diesel for cultivation, fertilisers, and sprays produced from fossil fuels; and by a harvesting, transport and production processes using fossil fuels. By the time you have done all that you have used so much fossil energy that the biogas produced is little better than a fossil fuel.
Putting maize into an Anaerobic Digester is not an efficient way to produce energy either– it involves a huge loss of the potential calorific value of the maize (or rye, or potatoes) used. At least in the normal course of farming maize silage produces meat or milk before being turned into cowshit. By using a bio-digester the cows are cut out of the process, the maize is effectively turned straight into methane-producing shit without the agency of the cow. And other climate change implications also need considering: the high levels of nitrogen fertiliser used in maize cultivation produce large amounts of nitrous oxide, a powerful warming gas. Maize is also a crop that when harvested leaves the soil very vulnerable to erosion. An alternative, short rotation coppice would protect the soil far better and produce roughly twice as much energy as an equivalent maize crop.
There are two much better claims on our rural land. One is for food production, the other is to provide space for the regeneration of our biosphere, space for all the organisms that can help the biosphere to recover the productive and supportive capacity that we, through the agency of our farmers, are well on the way to destroying. Biogas doesn’t even come close as a priority, except if you are a farmer whose claim that ‘farmers feed the nation’ is purely cynical.
So I assumed that this farm was also a nest of Biodigesters. I looked on Google Earth and could see no sign. The farm buildings were so recent that they didn’t even show on the Ordnance Survey map. I looked up planning applications and found that an application for prior approval of a digester had indeed been made, and turned down mainly because it was badly drafted. Knowing that farmers sometimes build things without planning permission, I thought I’d have a look around the local footpaths. This farm is a collection of very recent buildings, a dairy unit approved in 2008, and possibly a pig unit that was also under consideration then. All this was built in the middle of open farmland very recently. I walked around the area, able to stray from the footpath because the farmer seemed to have got rid of the fingerposts, allowing me to argue that I was lost, if challenged. There was no sign of a digester or of any cows, and a fairly strong smell of pig.
As I made my way back to the road I bumped into four more tractors tushing silage trailers, and stopped one to ask what the silage was for. He said it was for feeding the dairy herd of 300 cows. So no digester, ostensibly, though there’s always the possibility that this silage will become feedstock for a local digester – there are at least two close by that I know of. And another nice job for the contractor.
Going back down the road I turned into the yard of a farmer I know well because I keep bees in his cider orchards. Did it make sense, I asked him, to make a 54-mile round trip with a load of maize for silage? He didn’t think it did, but he suggested that the demand for maize for digesters had skewed the market so badly that farmers who needed maize silage as winter feed for their cattle might have to go to lengths to get it. And if the dairy farmer was trying to run a very large milking herd with too many cows for his farm, he would have to compete with the digesters to get silage to feed his cows over the winter, not having enough land to grow it himself on his overstocked farm.
The Dasgupta Report on ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’ has introduced me to the concept of ‘perverse subsidies’: “Governments almost everywhere .. pay…people more to exploit the biosphere than they do to protect it. These payments have been called perverse subsidies.” This is how it becomes possible to tush maize half across the county to a bio-digester, or to a dairy unit too big to be sustainable on the plot of farmland where it has been sited. The farmers may be able, thanks to perverse subsidies, to make a profit, but you and I and the biosphere of the planet are all making a loss.
This, while we are about it, links to what is maybe one of the main points made by the Dasgupta ‘Review of the Economics of Biodiversity’, which is that our economics does not take into account the value of natural resources such as biodiversity, so that our activities can be supposed to be ‘profitable’ when they are actually destroying these resources, eating into our natural capital. Some of these resources are finite, but biodiversity can regenerate, which is why helping it to do so is one of our top priorities. Most of our biodiversity exists on what we call farmland, which is why it is so crucial to review farming practices, and to encourage sustainable regenerative farming, and to stop paying farmers ‘perverse subsidies’ that make it worth their while to do the stupid things described above.
The Dasgupta Review is very comprehensive. Very long. But especially for your delectation I quote below the 137 words that I think best sum up his message, thus saving you hours of reading:
“Beyond its intrinsic – and incalculable – worth, biodiversity provides fundamental natural “dividends” that nourish and protect us: from basic sustenance through fish stocks or insects that pollinate crops, to soil regeneration, and water and flooding regulation. Not to mention the cultural and spiritual values that enrich our lives.
The total absence of these essential “ecosystem services” in national balance sheets has only served to intensify exploitation of the natural world.
A very simple example of the gaping holes in our accounting might see woodland destroyed to build a shopping centre. GDP records an increase in produced capital, but no depreciation of the “natural capital” that absorbs carbon, prevents soil erosion, creates a habitat for much-needed pollinators, and provides direct benefits to us – from recreation to purified air – that reduce burdens on health services. Such losses carry economic costs.”
It seems to me that for an accounting system to incorporate these ideas the accounts would have to be prepared and presented for us, as stakeholders in the planet, rather than just the shareholders. Some very fundamental changes to the way capitalism functions cannot be avoided if we are to save this planet, and that’s me putting it very mildly..
The brother
The production of nitrogen fertiliser is itself an energy intensive activity, with CO2 as a byproduct Hence the recent shortage of CO2 as an industrial gas with the hike in gas prices, and government intervention to ensure continued production
Edward says you are 100% correct …