The new environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, appears to believe that farmers and local communities are unable to make the right choices about which land should be used to produce food and which to produce energy (Ministers hope to ban solar projects from most English farms, 10 October).
This is not a new problem for farmers. In the 19th century, my predecessors chose to produce energy on one-third of my farm and food on two-thirds. Without the oats grown on a large part of the farm, we could not have fed the horses enough energy to allow them to help us to produce human food on the rest of the farm.
It may come as a shock to Jayawardena, but modern progressive farmers are constantly seeking to balance not just food and energy production, but also carbon sequestration and biodiversity enhancement. I believe we have the ability, by working together with communities, environmentalists and others, to deliver each of these things in balance, but only if we are allowed the flexibility to choose our own solutions. If we are dictated to by governments with little or no understanding of the complexities or trade-offs involved, it is almost inevitable that we will fail on not just food security and energy security but also climate change and reversing the biodiversity crises.
Stuart Roberts
Harpenden, Hertfordshire
• The environment secretary’s initiative to define more farmland as the “best and most versatile” and end its loss to huge solar farms is overdue. Changing open countryside into large blocks of fenced-off panels should never have been permitted to start.
In 2014, the coalition government envisaged solar arrays being on industrial roof space, and its then agriculture minister, Liz Truss, spoke against using farmland. Truss promised in her leadership campaign to see this through. The scale of damage was highlighted in two parliamentary debates earlier this year, on 9 March and 8 June.
If Ranil Jayawardena can remove the distinction between grades 3a and 3b in the agricultural land classification, he will doing the nation a wider service. It dates from the 1960s, and farming practice and husbandry has changed so much since then that it is meaningless. All it does is give work to consultants paid by housebuilders and solar energy companies to test soils and report that land is grade 3b or lower, so that it can be developed.
Planning restrictions on windfarms have saved many English landscapes from large turbines and made wind energy companies go offshore. Extending the protection of farmland from development by ending the grade 3a/3b distinction would have a similar beneficial effect: keeping our land for food and making solar developers use industrial roof space.
Mark Sullivan
Campaign to Protect Rural England, West Midlands region
• The environment secretary is reportedly opposed to solar farms because they take land out of food production. This need not be the case. Developing agrivoltaic technology is demonstrating that crops can be very successfully grown under raised solar panels.
Duncan Forbes
Charlbury, Oxfordshire
• It’s a common misconception that solar farms are incompatible with agricultural use of the land. Friends in Maine, US, have a photovoltaic farm with 140,000 panels, beneath which graze a flock of 200 sheep.
Peter Campion
Stockley, Wiltshire
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