Post Brexit Agriculture

Faust

At some point the global village will have to bite the bullet regarding population explosion - the earth is finite.

Would it actually be such a bad thing if civilisation collapsed?  Let's face it for all of mans technological achievements we made an awful mess of the planet.  Large areas of land polluted, animal species wiped of the face of the planet, ecological and environmental damage, depletion of resources etc. etc.

I think wiping the slate clean and seeing what evolves when we're gone may be a good thing in the longer term.  We've had our chance.

apolloa

You don't have children then?

thegeby

We should be growing a lot more in the UK, and make the supermarkets pay a fair price for it all, make the market work as it's supposed to, we WILL have to pay for it as no doubt the big corporations won't lose profits, but it's a much better thing then having everything practically imported.
As for the money the EU gives them, hmm well I've seen stinking rich farmers and poor farmers, so reduce funding to the rich ones and give a bit more help to the poor ones.

We have plenty of land for these solar panel farms and farming and to retain the British beauty.

fluxo

That was a lot of contradictory statements in one go. Supermarket low-balling is the market at work. Agricultural imports will be a major part of any trade deal, probably not in favour of UK agriculture. So, any increase in food production in the UK will have to be achieved by lowering input costs (mainly salaries, but also using less fertiliser, etc..). In this scenario it is the megafarms of East Anglia that can survive and will probably expand by incorporating failing smaller farms. So government support, if still allowed under the trade deals, will go to them. If you're a fell farmer, tough luck...

IronGiant

The CAP has been very wasteful, as I understand it. However, some of the recipients may be politically connected to the governing party, which may not go unnoticed by those considering future arrangements.

Faust

Then surely you should be encouraging us to eat GM food in the hope things go badly wrong  


note: not a serious comment

Sonic67

Two.   They are fully aware of my views and agree with them.

tapzilla2k

Neither the planet or the universe cares whether we exist or not. Neither does either care about the existence of animal life. The universe is rocks, gases and vacuum. That's it.

apolloa

Earth's resources are finite, but there is plenty of material in the solar system to exploit. We've outgrown the planet, we have the technological means to explore the solar system using unmanned and manned missions.

Civilisation has collapsed before and it nearly always leads to an era of progress going backwards while things sort themselves out. We are on the cusp of making some truly transformative break through's across many fields. Our biggest problem is the addiction to oil and reluctance to ease ourselves off it with new sources of energy.   

Our next step is space exploration. We either do that or we will likely become extinct or evolve into something else.

Faust

Simple solution, pay more for your cheap food, and how do you know any deal will not be in the UK's favour? That's more doom and gloom being predicted isn't it...

Or we could also wake up to the fact these giant corporations can swallow paying more to farmers, and make the market work. The market does not work when their is some ludicrous legislation in place from other EU countries and the corp giants buy as cheap as possible, or force the costs paid to be as cheap as possible to maximise profits, that's not a market working, that's profiteering.

2 problems here, firstly we have only managed to get to the moon and that's even heavily contested it ever happened, we do not have the technological means to send manned missions through the solar system!
Secondly, why should we as humans, no what right do we as humans have to go to another planet and destroy that too? Because that's all we've managed to do to earth so far... we don't care about it's environment or the animals and plants that live in it. We are more then happy to destroy life for resources to make money, and we'll do exactly the same on another planet..