The worst major crop for soil erosion in the UK is maize: widely spaced, planted and harvested late, leaving the land bare in winter: a formula for disaster. Most of it is grown for animal feed, but the fastest expansion is for anaerobic digestion. Thread/ assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl… 
In both cases, we’re compromising the future productivity of the land, and therefore our own survival, for perverse and unnecessary reasons (we don’t need animal products). But growing maize to dump into anaerobic digesters is a real outrage.
The whole point of AD was to use waste materials to make biogas. That’s how it was sold to us. But from the beginning, the government encouraged farmers to grow dedicated crops for it, especially maize, silage and potatoes, all which happen to be ecologically devastating.
It’s a completely perverse outcome, encouraged by the lobbying power of the @NFUtweets and the industrial interests they support. This “green” fuel swallows up land that should be growing food, rips the soil from it and requires lashings of pesticides and fertilisers.
When you consider all the inputs and outputs, it almost certainly causes higher greenhouse gas emissions than the fossil methane it is meant to replace.
theguardian.com/environment/ge…
theguardian.com/environment/ge…
The sludge left behind when the biogas has been produced (the "digestate") is spread back on the fields. It is highly reactive and has already caused a series of massive river pollution disasters.
Everything about this is mad. And yet it is expanding at 14% a year.
Everything about this is mad. And yet it is expanding at 14% a year.
It’s time for @DefraGovUK and George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, to get a grip and stop this idiocy. But Defra still seems to stand for
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