Policy is being driven by the vision for agriculture

We produce suckled calves for the store market and finished lambs. The ambition is to produce our own replacements and as much off grass as possible. The Dumfries farm is currently one of Scotland’s monitor farms and there is a lot of legislation going through Holyrood just now, much with implications for farmers and crofters.

Agriculture Bill, Land Reform Bill, nature crisis, developing a natural capital market – go onto the Scottish Government consultations website and be amazed. Most directly affecting us is the Agriculture Bill and the nature environment biodiversity work.

Policy is being driven by the vision for agriculture and the Bute House Agreement (yes, it is still in the mix despite the Greens being out of government). The world has changed dramatically since these were published with food security and energy security being sacrificed on a net-zero agenda.

The UK is responsible for almost 2% of global CO₂. Scotland is a fraction of that with agriculture a fraction of Scottish emissions. Put simply, if Scotland were to disappear into the sea, it would make no significant difference to global carbon.

The future of the planet will not be determined by us but by poor people in Asia and Latin America who couldn’t care about saving the planet because they are poor. Some 120m people in China do not have enough food – they are basically malnourished.

One third of all children who live in poverty are in the Indian subcontinent – they are also malnourished and prone to disease. They will not choose to remain in poverty over saving the planet and their governments know this.

We are painting a picture of renewables being the great salvation. A major factor to the cost-of-living crisis is the cost of energy so why, with all the renewables that are feeding into the grid currently, are we facing the highest-ever energy bills?

Renewables are green, yet you need fossil fuels to manufacture and install them. The turbine blades are made from carbon fibre that have no end-of-life use, so after approximately 20 years they head for landfill. Over their lifetime, there will be less but not zero carbon over fossil fuels.

Heat pumps are basically reverse fridges and require energy to run them, more so in cold weather. There are plastic polymers in solar panels, again made from fossil fuels. Electric cars require substantial batteries. For our industry, a decent tractor will require a battery, if not two, that could weigh several tonnes.

Work from the United States shows a lorry equivalent would need something more than three tonnes of battery. The rare metals like lithium and cadmium that are required for this battery would have been ripped out of the planet somewhere by powerful fossil-fuelled machines destroying the local environment and moving millions of tonnes of earth, probably in Africa, then shipped more than likely to China to be processed into batteries in factories powered by fossil fuels. They are still building coal-fired power stations in China.

Meanwhile, we in the UK rely on standby power stations when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, mainly fuelled by natural gas. I can accept that the climate is changing – it always has over the millions of years that this planet has existed – and man’s existence is but a mere blip of that time and it will always change.

Currently, we are coming out of a mini-ice age and are in a period of interglacial warming.

“How dare you”, “climate denier” – these phrases are typical of the way people who challenge the perceived wisdom are vilified. Why shouldn’t we be constantly questioning what we are doing and asking if there is better? Let’s not deny that the weather is challenging, let’s not deny that there are limited resources, including fossil fuels, on this planet and we, the population, are multiplying almost exponentially.

At the time of Christ’s birth, the world population was just 300m – today we are more than 8bn and rising. We need the limited resources of this planet to sustainably keep this population from poverty, malnutrition, and ultimate self-destruction.

To deal with this, we need to harness all the technological and scientific breakthroughs that we have at our disposal and continue to push at boundaries, as we don’t know what we don’t yet know. Prioritise clean, green energy and above all it must be cheap. We already have one of the cleanest energy resources at our fingertips – nuclear – but because of political dogma we are discounting it. Look up the carbon footprint of a nuclear reactor compared to all the options that are being pressed on us heavily subsidised.

We have the next step forward with nuclear fusion rather than fission where the energy is derived from combining rather than breaking atoms. As an added positive, the actual footprint of the site would be significantly smaller than all the other options promoted by policymakers, freeing up more for the environment and food production.

We could then choose using this energy to make green hydrogen from our plentiful Scottish water. Loch Ness has more water in it than all the lakes in England and Wales and is self-replenishing. Green hydrogen can be used in fuel cells in transport like trucks and tractors that would be cleaner, greener and lighter, with more power and work capacity than battery equivalent and can be supplied to match demand.

We can use it in engines without the same scale of pillage to the environment. Green ammonia is the next obvious step. Currently nitrate fertilisers are made using fossil fuels. Hydrogen from the electrolyser and nitrogen from the air can be combined through a nitrogen generation unit with no fossil fuels needed to produce fertilisers.

We can move to a space where we have reliable energy security and not being held ransom to any foreign country which we depend on for resource that may become hostile to us in the future. Abundant cheap, green energy will allow us to produce more of our own food sustainably, with minimal environmental impact.

The entire food chain and our population would benefit from adding this – it must be a mix – but we should not be dismissing one of the cleanest energy-producing resources such as nuclear. Submarines are under the sea for weeks with ease on nuclear power. I believe that on our current path, the policymakers are behaving like King Canute with climate change. Many other countries are adopting these technologies (including China), and we are being left behind. There needs to be adoption of modern nuclear technologies offering reliable, abundant and cheap green energy.

There is no way the targets that have been set for the very near future will ever be achieved with the current drip-drip tinkering policy trying to make every industry including agriculture deliver while denying access to a major contributory resource. stop talking about another energy company start talking about producing cheap nuclear energy. Save the planet and fight poverty.

The survival of all species will as ever be for those most able to adapt.