The UNEthical Economist

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week. One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there. The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere. Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it. - Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters. - Cover it in solar panels. - Put a data centre on it. - Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery. Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026. Now the bit with a date on it. From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land. So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security. Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field. And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move. Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference. Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.