Jeremy's Blog 9th September 2022: Competing Uses for Rural Land

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 8th September 2022

Location, location, location. That has been the received mantra for the housing and we now have to thing more about what might be the better uses for the very different kinds of rural land that we work with. We see a wider, more varied and complex range than simply that from silt fen to acid heath, with factors from location to geology and the opportunities and issues in the marketplace. At the same time, there are now more alternative uses competing for use of land, some compatible with farming and some that would substitute for it. Development, recreation and infrastructure are joined by energy, forestry, carbon, climate change mitigation, nutrient sequestration, biodiversity and others.

DEFRA observes that 57 per cent of agricultural output comes from 33 per cent of the farmed land area while Henry Dimbleby reported that 20 per cent of our land produces 3 per cent of our calories. The CAAV reviewed soils issues critical for farming in July at Norbury Park and at last week’s successful Young Valuers Conference at Cranfield University with its soils, agricultural and technological research work.

In June, DEFRA’s Food Strategy White Paper proposed a land use framework for publication in 2023. Local Nature Recovery Strategies are to be developed under the Environment Act and influence land use. The CAAV looked at the larger issues here in Future Rural Land Uses in the United Kingdom (March 2021), stressing that the outcome will turn on the individual choices of owners, farmers and others in the marketplace.

Looking simply at energy, currently topical and needing a mix of sources for resilience, different forms of generation have different impacts on land use and indeed on food production:

• offshore wind, a major producer takes no land directly but cables come onshore.
• onshore wind uses some land and can impinge more
• while solar farms largely exclude substantial agricultural use they are more efficient than photosynthesis at producing power and so calculations point to one acre of solar farm matching 66 acres of biomass, releasing 65 acres for food production or other uses.

That still leaves the issue of which land is used for energy. Turbines need to be where there is wind, the optimal conditions for solar panels are not linked to the capacity of land to produce food. As energy markets change, so more generation might be near use and we may become more interested in self-supply and perhaps local power systems. The need to transmit and distribute electricity is to see between 150,000 and 450,000 miles of new cables, inevitably much of this across rural land, with more ground-mounted transformers.

With similar issues, from water to climate change mitigation and adaptation, applying and interacting across the country, CAAV members will be advising clients through these opportunities and challenges.